the forget me nots of angels
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Had he been given the option, he would have remained unmoored, adrift, for the remainder of eternity. A black star amid the lightly kissed sheet of night, untethered from his perpetuity upon solid ground; a soul set free by the rending jaws of an Outland woman. Even among the moons, even bedded between galaxies, he could feel how her fangs scissored his throat, sheathing the pliant ebony of his neck in red, red, red.
A death knell, their cries. Her, one of betrayal and wrath as his horn drove home—his, a snarling cackle of inevitable defeat as he dragged his body from her corpse, crawling towards a patch of moonlight upon the ruined, ashen plain of Edana. There was nothing merciful beneath the hoary gaze of his midnight queen: seated upon her throne, coiffed to her crescent perfection as she passed her judgment upon his heaving breath.
One after another, each was too many—and he choked upon her lawlessness, his scarred lips twisted with morose satisfaction at the lull of their final intimacy; his last, precious moment beneath the stars.
He had died before the passing of dawn, his head limp among the soot and the cinder as the sun crested its horizon. And she had taken him to her breast, her embrace as amorous as a lover, and cradled him covetously close.
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But even death, it would seem, could not be permanent for the Shadeling.
How long ago his eyes had drawn open, his chest heaving breath, he could not say for certain. He lay upon his side, amid the grasses that fringed the still Denoctian waters. It was only fitting that he had returned to the living come nightfall, just another shadow upon the land; a spread of silken ebony, pooled and tattered upon Vitreus’ lake. As weak as he was revitalized; a incensed as he was placid. His veins coiled through his body with tepid, virile dissatisfaction—a man plundered and driven from his lover’s bed too soon; as though living was no longer enough.
And beyond the Shadeling’s discontent lay a deeper, darker misery. An inescapable loneliness that pierced his chest with knives, with fangs, with claws—he had bled many a time for his moon, for his midnight, and yet—
She had left him with nothing. He could feel the age within his bones, the vacancy within his marrow, where power ought to have lain. The shadows did not heed his muttered song, and all he could speak of his dismay was a throaty, battered laugh.
Enamored as ever with her games, the moon-white of his eyes tilted heavenward, slotting their gaze together with vindication—with reverence.
He was a wanton pawn of the nighttime fate, and he gathered himself slowly to all fours, the world teetering, as he heeded the gentle whistle of wind that caused the lake’s waters to ripple. Like the tide, like the mirror sheen of great waters, he heeded the allure of the moon with only mild bitterness upon his tongue.
Mingled with coppery blood, from where his teeth had ground together before his waking hours.
Hraefn pulled upon the tenebrous whims of the world once more, demanding the shadows heed his call.
They did not.
His smile was slow; sardonic. It was starved, voracious, as he looked towards the skies with a languid, drawling breath.
"Ab mujhe kis narak mein le gae ho?"
the death knell
