“He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
This has always been my favorite place, where our souls and our minds tangle up like weeds. I can hardly feel his skin beneath my lips and my heart is thrumming loud enough to stop against my bones. Here there is only the vision of me, of him, of each sweet aching part of life sketching out constellations in us. I dance between them, with dead butterflies caught in my teeth instead of roses and stones. If I am smiling, it's not a shape my form knows how to take (it's too bright, moon-bright).
If I am anything but his, it is not a shape my soul knows how to take.
Beneath this version of us, the sea of memories is nothing more than a universe of our creation. Here we are gods and lovers. Here I am not the only one who watches time flicker on by (like a hundred dying, falling stars) and never touch my skin.
Here Eik is forever. Sometimes I think I will die here, tangled up with him in the heart and the form, until our bones turn to seed and dust.
But as it always does the rest of the world leaks in. There is Fable trying to turn his head away because this is the one place he cannot reach me. There is my ship whispering by the sound of its sails in the wind. There is the glimmer of a halberd begging me to run my horn along the brutal edge of it.
And there is a war waiting for us. There is always a war.
I can feel his skin now, as I run my lips along it like he's the only map I want to read. I can feel his heartbeat, as steady as a desert sun. “No.” To the thing below his skin I whisper it, that thing that will always be mine and mine alone. No one has known that thing beneath his skin as well as I do (as well as I always will. Forever). Part of me whats to tell him that there is no end besides the ones we make. I want to braid and eternity of knots into his mane, one for each soul we will save by fighting this war only we, only I, have the power too.
How perfect could the world be, if the gods were not all so terrible? What could it be if the gods loved something other than themselves?
We will see. Fable answers the questions I'm still too mortal to discover. There has not been a time where I did not know how old his soul was, between the two of us he has always been wiser (and kinder). And I know Eik can hear it too, all the dark parts of my soul and the thoughts it thinks when it gives up pretending to be nothing more than a queen in a moonstone castle.
It still feels further away than it should-- this fate. Here with my knots in his mane, and my lips to his skin, and our souls pressed together like flower petals between pages, there is only this moment. The calm before the storm.
And it is any wonder then, why I grab that knot between my teeth and pull him into the belly of my warship?
Is it any wonder at all, that I use teeth, and lip, and beg him to make me feel like something mortal again?
Is it any wonder at all?
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