[P] A dream once lost among sorrow and songs

[Elena]

Elena Daray

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

T

he world outside is washed in twilight and mountain air. She cant help but feel he has the advantage here. Her sun is gone, her blue skies a distant memory until morning. She looks at the mural of the stallions. They ask her why she is here. Why she is here with a monk, and Elena has no answer for them. She just asks that same monk why he is afraid of her. The golden girl feels his fear, but what she feels more is his guilt. He steps close to her, her long, blonde hair rests down by the soft curve of her jaw. She looks impossible bright here, too bright, too bright for what darkness this place will bring her.

She is foolish. She grows more foolish the longer she stays.

His parents, her parents, they died for their children, the ultimate sacrifice, a sacrifice that makes them more godlike than those that watch the world sink into turmoil. “I’ve never felt less like an orphan than when I am with you.” She says, she confesses, and this truth will undo her. “Tenebrae,” she says moving forwards, but catching herself like an invisible net. She wants to melt her body into gold and wrap around him.

She does not move, does not breathe, there sits her heart made of glass in the middle, and just a single glance, one exhale, it could shatter it all. Elena, one voice manages to whisper to her. It whispers as her body sears with heat and magic. It burns against the heart upon her brow, so lovingly placed there by her parent’s love for one another. Your child, it says. And his, it weeps. A vision stretches over her mind, a little girl with a heart upon her brow and a crescent moon snuggling against her shoulder. Blue eyes and shadows dancing at her feet. A warmth sears in her belly as the shadows sink into her. And in that moment, she knows, oh she knows. All mother’s do. She breathes in the immortality, and exhales the secret of their child growing inside her. Then:

I cannot bear to live a life, an eternity, without seeing you.

It kicks the air out of her chest.
Opens up a gaping chasm in the pit of her gut.
She has never fallen from quite this high.

The impact is sudden, abrupt.

Between the secret granted her and Tenebrae’s words, Elena can no longer stay whole. She is shattered and falling apart and his words do nothing to dull the roar that is growing in her ears. They are just lies, she tells herself. It’s a kindness. It doesn’t matter because what he has done, what he doing is already rooted and blossoming like thorn rather than flowers in her chest. She feels the prick of each and every one on her golden skin and is surprised how each fresh wound hurts so completely on its own. One would think that she would be used to it by now. One would think that this would be a familiar pain, something that she could map with her eyes closed, drawing a finger along the familiar ridges of her own heartache.

But it is new, this time.

It is fresh and she has no defense against it.

The chasm between them widens and still, even now, she wants to race across it. She wants to hurl herself over it with all she can, but she can’t, they are worlds apart already. “Don’t lie to me,” her voice is quiet and she aches with it. “It makes it so much worse. Please don’t lie.” She breathes, it was so difficult. “What was her name? You never told me.” She accuses, like it matters, like it would hurt any less. “Would you leave the order for…” She stops, if she does not ask, he cannot answer.

She wants to ask him so many more questions. Why did there have to be another? Why could she be someone’s light without herself burning out for them? Why couldn't she hang onto love? Why did they tell her how much they loved her and then leave all the same? But she knows the answer lies within her own inadequacies and she’s not quite ready to face that truth just yet.

So instead she lifts her blue eyes for one of the last times to trace the handsome angles of his face, studying them, reminding herself of a time that they looked at her with love, with hunger, with fire, her fire, and not with pain and guilt. She reminds herself that she had once been loved, even if maybe it was false, she thinks now. (It will be enough, she thinks, to remember.) A sob threatens to climb her throat, to spill onto her tongue, to press its needy hands to his chest. It is something that only grows worse the longer that she stays with him, something that only grows within her with each passing second, the space between them so tiny and yet so infinite. She can feel entire galaxies pressing between them, new lives, timelines that had no business drawing air pushed up between the two of them as if they belonged.

She should tell him. She should tell him. About her baby, his baby, their baby. Their child. One created from shadows and sunlight, from a dance under moonlight and lake water baptisms. Would their child not be worth leaving the order for? Would it not be worth it to lose your sight? Elena had lost her sight once and she knows already she would pluck the eyes from her skull if it meant she could make her baby see the beauty of the day. But her tongue halts in his mouth when he speaks.

And ours is an impossible love.

And just like that, her world implodes. Her veins splinter, they fracture, pressing metal shards into her flesh until she is nearly crying out with pain. Her lips part on a jagged breath as he continues to toss daggers at her, each one finding purchase in her breast, the wounds opening up beneath his assault. He has been cruel to her before, she should have known he was capable of it, carrying knives in his back pocket. And she can feel her heart stretch thin, so thin, until the skin rips and tears and crumbles to dust within the bone cage of her aching chest.

She is dissolving before him, but she still remains quiet. She is shattering

She is falling, falling, falling.

She is shaking him at the shoulders, screaming at him to love her, to love their child, and he cannot. She cannot fall upon this spear again and again. She is made to love and, in turn, be loved. Perhaps not in the way that is expected (she loves like the wind loves the swirling dunes of the deserts; she is to be loved as the sun loves the ever waning moon), but she is to be loved. She expects it—was raised to expect it.

And he—well, he could not.

She studies him, memorizes him, loves him in spite of it all.

“I will think of you,” she confesses, one more time. “I do not expect you to think of me.” Elena says and looks at him, and smiles, thinks she smiles, even if it is only a muted curve pressed into her cheek. He is still touching her, and she knows that if she stays, if they both stay, they could hold onto this moment forever, live through their immortality, turn to stone statues. Two lovers, that is what they would call them. She cannot yet sacrifice her life for her child, so she sacrifices her heart. Rips it from her chest and covers it in stone, pretending that this can keep him from breaking it. But walls of stone have never stopped shadows before. And she says something, something she meant to say that day in the hospital, but had been far too weak. But everyone forgets how strong Elena grows, like a sun waiting for the morning. “Don’t come back to me, Tenebrae.”

Maybe, at the end of it all, shadows were never meant to be brought into the light.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Tenebrae