She is like a wraith in the night, living dark, living shadow, cruel and beautiful and sharp in her brokenness. Once she had been used to the loneliness, preferred such an isolation over the company of others if only because in the silence she was safe, no prying eyes to notice the cracks in her soul and drag out the secrets she would rather keep buried. Secrets she had only ever shared willingly with one other.
But he was gone now – because of her greed, because of the world they lived in, because no light can shine that bright without burning out.
Now all her days and nights are as they were before, jagged pieces of a life carved to be without relief, without pleasure. But she did not deserve those things, not when she had been remade by so many cruel hands, turned into something dark and wild, a beast better left to the dusky landscape of nightmares. Not when it was her greed, her bloodline, her curse that drew Beqanna’s eyes to Killdare to orchestrate his end. It should have been her, her a thousand times over. Should have been her when Pollock took her in the forest, buried himself in her hips and then her in the ground.
Maybe he would still be alive if only she’d had the courage to stay dead.
Even in her pain, in the way she strips herself bare, in the feral loneliness with which she haunts this world like a ghost, she is silent and stoic and unreadable, slipping wordlessly through the twisted trees and to a dark shore until she can see the streaks of lava interrupting the dark of deep night.
It’s been so long.
So long since she returned to the place she had made home with Offspring and his people, home again when Killdare had been returned to her.
But when she looks at it now there is only pain, only a void she cannot fill, a weight, an ache, a sorrow that buries itself in the marrow of her immortal bones. She knows she shouldn’t, knows she can’t, but suddenly she is knee-deep, chest-deep, chin-deep in water and swimming hard from the shores of the meadow to the shores of Tephra. Maybe it is because her family is still there. Isle and her children, Exist and hers, Leliana. Maybe it is to count the old faces from the Chamber, remember a legacy left behind. But when she hits the shore and her eyes find a silhouette carved from dark and stone, all else is forgotten.
“Offspring.” She says, unable to look into those gleaming red eyes without remembering how they had stared back at her from the confines of a stall, without remembering that they were connected by so much pain, so much horror – that she was forever bound to him in a way she was with very few others. She moves to his side, languid and lethal, choosing to hide from him that she is made only of broken pieces now, that without someone to tether to, she is lost and adrift and sinking fast. It is not his burden to bear, she is not his to care for, though she cannot help but furrow her brow and reach out to touch her mouth to his jaw to smooth out the deep lines of tension she finds waiting there.
For a long moment she is only silent, does not bother to ask if he is alright because she is not stupid, because she knows he is not. They are not creatures made to be broken and used, manipulated and then returned as though nothing had ever happened. There is no amount of forgetting that can make it okay, especially at night when the dark comes and brings with it the promise of nightmares.
“Three times.” She says finally, stiffly, clenching her jaw so tightly that it made furrows in the muscle across her cheek. “I was taken three times.” Twice by the madman he now knew, once by someone different. “I festered for so long,” she says again, softer now, quiet and bitter, slipping closer and touching her mouth to his shoulder, “thought I must be losing my mind.” Closer still, using her lips and her teeth to methodically soften the knots of muscle rippling beneath his dark skin. When she pauses there is tension in her face, in her body, in the wrinkle of a brow heavy beneath a crown of gleaming horns. “I should have been here for you, Offspring.” Her voice is low and quiet, an apology because she knows what it is like to try to live in a world that no longer understands you, with friends who watch with sad eyes and pitying smiles but cannot possibly understand.
Then, with eyes that are dark like burned emeralds, full of shadow and quiet and something dangerous, she softens, touches that greedy mouth to his neck and says, “I can give you tonight.” To share such wretched secrets, to lean on one another and heal. Some part of her wishes she could promise more to the man that had always been Killdare's best friend, to the man who knew all of her pain in a way so intimate and purely by circumstance. But she will not lie to him, knows she cannot offer more than one night, more than this night.
It is a binding kind of promise, a dangerous kind of tether, but she extends it to him like a hand in the dark.
MALIS
makai x oksana