the forget me nots of angels
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There was no god that Hraefn prayed to, no name holy enough to roll, sanctimonious, from his parted lips. He craved no deity but the stars, and yet through the ill-crafted irony of fate, he had been rolled into shadow. For a century, he had donned it as a silken cloaked curse, a second skin that melded to his own in finite, painless stitches. He had learned to curb the tide of dusk, to billow the cinder of a sinking sun at his hooves, to pool it at his feet like a cape.
There was no god that he prayed to, and yet the sinister warmth of his milky eyes was tipped heavenwards, the husky timbre of his voice intoned with a richness that brimmed with loathing; with devotion. He expected no star to descend to him (never had they before, but for one fated night), and he held no blade to poise toward the swart of his breast, to pierce the tenderness of his skin and offer his mistress the slick of his blood.
Nothing to offer but his word; his vengeance.
And that, perhaps, was why he did not hear her approach. The rounded flutes of his ears were sculpted back toward the copse of his mussed mane, drowning in the tempestuous swell of unruly, brambly hair. The wind kissed him with a liveliness that stirred his forelock to life: an inky aura to frame the scarred, brindled countenance of his haunted visage.
Her voice was the starlight he sought, the milk and honey reverence that called to him through months passed, that beckoned him to the throes of a midnight city, the gentle click of her crescent hooves upon the ancient cobbles of Northern stone.
Hraefn smiled before he turned to her, before he lay his eyes upon the girl—the woman—that the night had crafted with an image of envy. Her voice was a melodious interlude within the dimly lit truth of his solitude, setting his ribs alight with the flame if an impassioned breath as slowly, agonizingly, he turned his sculpted jaw to look upon her splendor.
As much a scrap of silk as he remembered: a fluttering cut of a butterfly’s silver wing; an opaline gemstone, rounded into perfect, youthful beauty; a bouquet of galaxies, and frost, and all that he had come to covet.
The Shadeling could not know how starved he was for light until it came to him once more, a solitary fragment that heaved with life, her heart a flutter within her breast, the flush of pink across her lips an inviting bed for his own. His muzzle spasmed with want, his muscles itched with restraint.
Once, he had been well-coiffed in his wildness—a creature fettered by the etiquette of his highborn world.
But he had woken within a bed of grass, the dew light upon his skin, the night cold upon his brow. He was a wilder thing than once he’d been—and yet the sweetness of his voice, a deep baritone that called to her from the gap that cleaved them in two, still sang of obsequious perfection.
"The night," he began, his words a threaded web. "Can always hear. The question is if it should deign to listen,"
The night had abandoned him.
Hraefn… a prayer of her own, he dared to believe—
Stellanor had not.
His body angled toward her of its own volition, and he damned the aching within his jaw, the hunger for the suppleness of her skin, as his voice peeled free of its cage. He stepped toward her with the traitorous allure of a nightbloom blossom, begging her to return to his thrall; to bury his nose into the sweetness of her Aegean hair.
“Taaron Ka,” he had not spoken that astral name in many a moon—he had forgotten it, within the cinder of the Outlands. She whispered to him of foreign, nebulous tongues, but he cared not for the stars that lay above. “And yet your voice is just the same.”
Another step chanced forward, a muscle within his jaw feathering.
Perhaps there was a god, a woman, he might pray to.
“Meree chaandanee."
the death knell
