Stellanor
She dreams of those moonwashed streets often;
The unquiet darkness, suffuse with the way a city tends to seethe only at night. Festal and defiant, throwing off the yoke of daylit expectation, basking in the nakedness and the way that nakedness feels in the cold touch of eventide.
She dreams of the inebriate hoards. The shambling, listing forms—like libidinous ships on cobbled seas—lurching in and out of oily lamplight, singing unblushing sailor’s shanties. They pass her in the dark, pulled by an undertow to islands of unwashed light, spilling forth from the thrown opened doors of taverns and pleasure houses. They are drawn in by the soft siren songs of ale and thighs and the uncomfortable closeness that breeds all manner of delights and social decay.
They bash themselves upon the rocks of that saturnalia.
But not she.
She is bound for the annihilation of another lightless isle.
Had it been preordained that had she should meet him then?
Writ in the extinct stars she had navigated by, through streets paved in precarious moonshine and marble monuments to a doomed noblesse? Woven into the tapestry of time—her, under the libertine caresses of kin-starshed; he, beguiling worshipper at an altar of an eternal, stygian grace.
Was it chance that they should come together again, here?
Like two cruel and foolish gravities?
He is more man than she remembers. Unveiled and barbed in the dull, blooming radiance of night, exposing the raw, sable flesh that had always been below the bygone obedience of shadow. She has long harboured errant slips of his darkness, sewn into pink and lilac soil the night she let him take her as a sacrifice to an eyeless, unkind idol. There, it had grown, like dark gardens in the vacancies of her soul.
If she could, she would let him harvest from her.
After all this time.
But they are hers now, fetishes of a heaving, throbbing, visceral madness and desire that still slips like silk across her being when the sun disappears below the horizon, clutched like a sentimental favor to her breast. It it mutinous and self-destructive, but she can’t purge him and the memory of him from her. They are moored to the loneliness and the disillusionment that has constructed great, golden cities of want and need inside her. They are flowers and weeds in the soil beds of her own blossoming sense of self.
He had become the prince of some paradisiac kingdom in the sky, a land of milk and honey.
But when Laela had split open the belly of the Outlands and released upon the doomed continent the inelegant totems of her jealousy and rage—when Stella had fled aboard a merchant-vessel bound to safe ports, leaving behind the ghoul-consumed ravages of a second home—she had never expected to see him again.
Stella had consigned him to the swart depths of an unknown severance.
A shiver passes over her pale form. The world whirls and lists around her, steadied only by the perfect blackness he cuts against the mirrorlike water, still but for the slight way it fractures his elegant reflection against the mimic stars. She watches him turn his lamplight eyes to the fulsome moon; ears perked by the familiar, melodic edge of his Edanian dialect.
She knows she should return herself to the wild.
She knows she should allow herself the grace to be without.
But she can’t, because she is drawn to him, to the lightless trap of rocks at his abyssal cliffside. Stella slips forwards, heart rapping frantically against the lovely bones of her better judgement—run—until she can smell the piquant, once-timeless redolence of him.
“It can still hear you?” even after forsaking, stripping and remaking a man of mortal mien, he defers to a holiness she never quite got the chance to understand. Her deep, blue gaze wanders to the splay of hallowed stars; the new formations they trace, like such remote, jagged margins of new, uncharted land. Adventure and the foreboding of unknown. “These new constellations sometimes speak a tongue I do not recognize.” The stargazer’s voice is aching and frustrated.
She could ask him how he got out. But it seems too obvious, that he should persevere where others were consumed; proffered a second life, even after taking his fill of centuries. So, she simply revels in the fact that he had, fingering the electric edges of that void, of that danger that sparks in the empty, leaning space between their skin, even without his command of the shade.
“Hraefn...” her breath is caught in the enormity of her solitude and the unbearable heartache that seeks foolish antidote in his unattainable comfort.
Speech, @Tagged
it clutched the light,
the hallow bright
the hallow bright
