She thought she knew night as he did—
Until she met him, and understood it only deigned to bring her into its fold when it felt her worthy; only accepted her, so as a sacrifice, so that it might better speak through its ordained. It proffered her grace when she was charting its depths like an explorer, writing its memories and epics in lines and dots of well-ordered science. Genuflected to it—as she does now—like a cosmic pretender; like a lost thing, cloaked in promised stars then set upon the earth to wonder why she couldn’t have just belonged wholly.
Why she has to be a torn-soul—a thing not here nor there, and so neither—pulled in so many different directions her seams began to split and, finally, what lays beneath is being unearthed.
Excavated. Achingly.
Carelessly.
Feebly, as she too takes another hesitant step forward—the shadowed countenance of him making her unblushing and reckless—and fingers the hard, packed sediment of her once-was. Of her, as she can never be again; pulling at it like a scab from ichorous skin, until the rawness of the wound below is left bare and glistening in the dull moonlight. A little more her, even if it hurts. A little darker, a little lighter, that much closer to containing the tethers of who she wants to be, mantled in who she has to be.
She draws closer to him because, in truth, she always wondered if that closeness, if his ministrations and his words-like-prayers-to-her, would draw her closer to the font of eventide. Would offer her stars and moonlight like such pretty things in their purest forms, plucked from his own self-contained tenebrosity. If, by giving herself to him, he could make her whole, could consign her to the dark silk of night.
Still wonders.
Still hopes.
Even in his beautifully jilted state—without the billowing ranks of umbrae—she yearns for him to complete her. Or ruin her. Usher her to a cimmerian utopia, then burn it down around her.
She nods, turning her blue eyes upwards as he speaks—knows the way it winds and unwinds, teases her with its closeness and then its distance, in turn. “Does it? Does it listen?” Her voice is hopeful and delicate because it is also terribly breakable. Yes. She knows it’s flirtations too well; as each different array of stars she finds herself beneath, a wide-eyed wayfarer, inevitably greets her mouthless and unfriendly. Holds her at arm’s length until she breaches the divide, marries herself to their sure extinction together—accepts that those she once knew are now and forever caught in bleak and funereal abeyance, shifting above the colourless skeletons of damaged worlds. Gone. Unknowable once more; her Nordlyian and Edanaian star charts but memorial portraiture.
Perhaps, she is finally sick of wedding herself to the insensate.
Though she cannot yet understand every word this night utters, she holds a sharp faith that he is the decoder. The swart salvager of both of them. And so, they coalesce. She reaches out. Past the nest of expectations and hopes they both build, out of necessity, out of more—her eyes fluttering shut where the darkness once pressed upon her skin and made the pallid territories of her throat and cheek eclipsed.
Taaron Ka, like an entreaty—like hearing her own name again after a thousand years of deprivation—“For all that has come to pass...” she supposes it is a small miracle she is not dead—dead two times over—and still here to catch him where he falls, and visa versa
‘Meree chaandanee’—it is enough to push her over the edge, the purling, biting dialect she had held within herself in hopes, she brushes her lilly-pale cheek against his own, bruise-black, and she is blissfully ensnared again.
Full permission to power-play
the hallow bright
