so we let our shadows fall away like dust
She holds onto her silence as she walks beside him, lost to the pressure in her chest that, even now, pulls her in the opposite direction. It feels like she is abandoning Stillwater somehow, giving up on him and turning her back. But giving up on what? He had Djinni who loved him probably more than Luster could ever understand, loved him in that wild, violent way that worried her so. They even had a child on the way, a family binding them together whether they had meant for it to happen or not.
Maybe the only thing she turns from now is a closed door.
Still, when they reach the water together and she feels it splashed cold against her ankles, she is reminded of him again, reminded of what it is she is leaving behind. I'm yours. She hesitates, stops, can't help when her eyes flash dark and round and broken to the bone-white of Dovev's steady face. One, two, three steps closer to bury her face and his dark mane, to find strength in his quiet, in the strange way she sometimes catches him watching her. What would she have done without him in this moment?
When he steps forward and into the water, she follows, placing an uncertain kiss to his hip before surrendering to the pull of the waves and the tide below. She is surprisingly nervous at crossing the ocean, worried at the depth and the distance and the water in her nose. The only time she's ever been in the water before was when Stillwater pulled her below, when he let her trace all her love in the hollows of his smooth, dark skin. For a second she is broken again, uncertain and undecided, and she falls back behind the bone and dark stallion as the waves yawn between them. There is a moment of panic, just a flash where she grunts and kicks hard - but then he turns back to see her falling behind, abandons his place ahead to return to her side and she reaches for him, whispers an apology that tastes like the sea.
He stays by her in this way until their feet touch the sand of the Ischian shores and she falls quietly against him, laying her cheek behind the bone of his shoulder in silent, open gratitude. It is like this that she takes in the sight of the island around them, wordless and tired and pressed to him, stinking of salt and brine and blinking the sea from her eyes. There is so much water here, so much more than Sylva (an irony she does not miss) and the trees are brighter, wetter, tropical - though she doesn't know the name for it. In the deepening dusk the shore is awash in shades of teal and blue, glowing and bright beneath the surface in a way that makes her smile softly against him. It is reflexive when she reaches out with her magic, spilling fish made of white light to swim and splash among the blue.
She feels lips on her cheek, warm and soft and drawing her back again, and when he turns to move further up along the shore, she follows without question. Beside them, swimming quietly through the luminous blue, her fish join them. It is dark by the time he stops again, but somehow this island still seems bright, brighter than it had been with all its shores lit like wet blue fire. She steps closer to him and follows his gaze from the spring outside to the shape of grey stone hidden behind a tangle of woven ivy. "A cave." She observes in a quiet way, an amused way, leaning over to touch her lips to the soft of his whiskered chin. Of course she would find herself at the mouth of yet another cave, find herself in the echo of a memory she would rather not dwell on. Yet it follows her anyway. "I grew up in a cave." She tells him softly as she had told someone else, laying her cheek against his neck in a quiet way.
Then she pulls away to feel warm dampness against her skin - blood, she realizes belatedly, his where it seeps from wounds reopened and angry from their journey here. "Oh." She says softly, worried, forgetting all else as she pressed the heat of her mouth to nurse at the raw skin again, moving on only when the flesh felt clean and soothed and quieted in her wake. Her sad, dark eyes drift across his body and she frowns at the magnitude, frowns at this strange kind of living, perpetual torture. "Tell me what to do," she says, shifting to press another kiss to the celestial blue of his mouth, "tell me how to help." She ducks beneath him again, pressed to his chest and with those soft lips pulling insistently at the hollows of his skeletal face. Then, so quiet, so uncertain, she pours her magic into him with no way to know if it will only hurt him more. She wraps it gently over every ridge of bone and yawning hollow, makes it soft like silk when she weaves it between flesh and bone like a glowing shield and pulls him tighter to her. "Better or worse?" Her voice is soft and silver, full of ancient stars and quiet nights.
