we ain't never getting older. [magnus]

[magnus]

I wanna give you wild love, the kind that never slows down
I wanna take you high up let our hearts be the only sound

She is both of the new world and the old and he wonders how much of each she carries within her breast. He wonders how much of each he carries within him. The Jungle and the Gates and the Chamber all rattling around in his chest with Tephra, the weight of them like stones as they sit there. He is a patchwork stallion with all of his lives lived, all of the wars and raids and love, all that he has had and lost. He wonders if she can see the scars nestled amongst the more prominent of his markings, if she can see where he has been torn apart and then stitched together, where all of the greedy hands have dipped into his chest and taken and taken and taken—and then cursed when there was nothing in there left to give.

Such wanderings of the mind, however, stay hidden behind a crooked smile and the warmth of his gold-flecked eyes as he considers her. He drops her gaze as she tells him that she’s not infected, and he worries for a moment that he only cared for his own safety. “I am glad to hear it,” his whiskey voice is low and rumbles from his chest when he finally looks back up through the tangles of his onyx forelock. “I would hate to see you sick,” he admits, pressing the truth of it into her palm. He is not sure why he cares so much that she be safe, but he determines that she is too much of a wild thing to be tamed by something as regular as a disease, magic-born though it may be. “And it is good to know you would be cared for.”

His smile widens as she touches his shoulder and he returns the gesture, the velvet of his nose pressing into her flesh and breathing in the wild winds of her. “I suppose that you should,” he agrees, turning his handsome, heavy-jawed head to the land that unfolds around them. Were she to call him good, he might laugh. He might grow somber. To think of the blood on his hands. The wars he has played his part in starting. The death he has wrought. The way he sometimes hungered for it in ways he does his best to suppress—the anger that he can barely bite back at times. Still, he does not struggle with such darkness now and he instead moves to join her, shoulder brushing her own as they walk further inland.

“Such a simple question has an incredibly long answer,” his voice is light but there are undercurrents of something else beneath it as he looks at her out of the corner of his eye. “Are you sure that you are up for such a story? Would you like for me to start with this life or my first?” His lip quirks, hiding the pang in his heart he always feels about when he mentions his death, but it has been a while now, and it no longer holds the same power over him that it once had. “Perhaps we should start with you first instead.”

I wanna go where the lights burn low and you're only mine