She leans into him and he leans back like she’s the only thing keeping him from fading away into starlight. Because she is. Her touch, the warmth it triggers-- It is the oldest fire. More ritual than breathing. And as it spreads through his body he feels all the cracks beneath his skin and the way love shines through them like a caged star and he remembers with a sharp inhale: there are still things worth fighting for and there are still things worth dying for and love will always bring me back here.
She says she dreamed of him before, in the place across the sea. He remembers the first time he saw her, how he thought she was the dream. And he wonders, not for the first or last time, where it is they're from, and where it is they're going. This life, and the next, and the next, would they all be full of her? Surely they had to be.
"Maybe it was you who dreamed me into existence." He might as well have been something dreamed, summoned, shaped with one purpose buried in the clay of his skin. Tethered and blissfully hopeless. Quaky with love, he lips at the base of her ear-- a sliver of skin so delicate, so tangible. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that she was real. Flesh and bone. He had to break her down into smaller parts, capture the tiniest details to keep the whole from sweeping him away, again and again. An ear, a lock of hair, the soft hollows just past the eyes. The exact color of her belly, brushed by the full moon.
(and if he noticed she did not change, did not age, did not feel the enormous weight of time, growing heavier each year?
and if he felt time stretching them apart with a slow certainty that let him know it was not stopping and there was no coming back from this and you are going to die, and leave everyone behind, and--?
Well. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.)
The earth begins to quake as Isra works her magic. Eik can feel the way it aches and pulls and weeps. He wonders if it doesn’t take something from deep within them. A shard of something beautiful, pressed into sea glass. It’s too much. It’s all too much, and for a moment he just stares at it. It gleams like an invitation to be touched, loved, swung.
But she kisses him, and he lets himself forget about weapons. He doesn’t think of pain, or fury, or desperation or destiny. And she kisses his chest and his heart breaks, again, with the sheer delight of her love. “Of course,” he breathes into her mane, and thinks of everything she is to him. And he opens his mind wide so she can stroll through his thoughts and see how he sees her; singing their children to sleep, brow furrowed intensely, caught in a dream, a violence of beauty. Painted by the shadows of the church-tree, if shadows could be rainbows.
Oh, she was more than her rage, or her magic, or her past. Her past-- at the thought, images of it flit before them like blood-colored butterflies. (Or maybe he was never a dream of hers. Maybe he was there, somehow, really there, in the moonlight and the frost. With his promises. Maybe these are his memories, not hers, that swarm them now.) Her rage and her pain twist their wings and they fall, twitching, one by one to the cold ground.
(She looked different then, didn’t she? You recognized her instantly. There was not a single skin she could hide in, not from you)
He knows where they are going. He knows why. He also knows exactly what it is they leave behind. He knows he would do it again and again, and not just for her.
“Will there ever be an end to it?” The war. The fighting. The freeing. He wants to say “tell me there will be an end.” Couldn’t they one day sail to peace instead? Didn’t they deserve it? But he holds his tongue, because he knows better, and he smiles a sad smile. (How redundant-- they were always sad.)
Eik finally picks up the halberd, testing the weight of it in his telekinetic grip. It is perfect, of course. He swings it once, twice, three times. Easy. When it cuts through the air, it sings.
(Feel how you grow angry and restless. Listen to the sound as embers are fanned into flames. You know the evil that lives across the sea. You know the evil that enslaves and kills and-- don’t you remember-- it burns)
Endings be damned.
He's always known they were made to end wars, not escape them.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
E I K
but I have promises to keep
Time makes fools of us all
