09-29-2015, 02:41 PM
TREKK
“I love you! I’m so sorry, so sorry… But I do!” Her sobs are a chaotic solo against the melody of the waves upon the shore, of the sunset’s whispering words, of the creatures of the beach settling for nighttime. Her sobs bring forth a rush of sappy tears from her eyelids and a choking sound from his throat. They are silhouettes, now, against the backdrop of a drowning sun, and quickly after the moon rises to wash the beach – and their bodies – in the color of starlight.
Everything is vivid and sharp and perfect. Every move they make, every breath she sends to dance across his skin, every rumble of his words into her ears, every kiss he presses to her bark-rough skin. Vivid, sharp, and perfect. It is disturbed, however, by an awful cold that infiltrates the warmth of their skin pressed together, of their love intensifying the passion sparking a flame between them. A prickle of something wet and sharp with chill hits his shoulder, then another against his flank. The image of her wavers and flickers, like a mirage, before everything he sees is plunged into darkness.
The broken-hearted lover opens his eyes slowly. The world around him is painted with a thick layer of white, Mother Nature’s chilly arm of winter sweeping across Beqanna. Pulling his wings tighter around his body, he cannot help but think of her. The winter is always her least favorite season (it pulls at her magic, wrapping its frozen fingers around her spring leaves and budding flowers, tightening its grip around her heart and chest and lifeblood), and he figures this one will be no worse than the last. Just as well, it will be their own son’s fourth winter – the son that he raised himself, because she hid away from him again in her desperation and confusion. Their son had left him a year ago, now, and he had been living alone (he always seems to be alone, nowadays) since then.
Everyone runs away from him.
He doesn’t know where he might find her (she is a mirage, a whisp, a dream, a portrait, a hazy fog, a flickering flame just out of reach, a tall tree he is constantly walking toward), but he still looks. He’d had several months of relapse (of the darkness shadowing the corners of his mind, of the Beach looking tantalizingly comfortable, of cliffs ready for him to jump off of, of beaches ready for him to drown in, of painful nights spent crying in a corner of a world he didn’t feel a part of) after his son had left him.
He’d pulled away from it, if only because of the memory of her. Her doe-brown eyes (which are now bright, springtime green); her freckled, sun-kissed skin (which is now bark-covered and woven with blood veins of life); her long, strawberry locks tenderly brushing against her gentle cheekbones (locks which are now lively and plant-line, gentle cheekbones which are still there yet hidden under layers of something different and new). The memory of her kept him alive – as it has before.
But more than anything, he craves the real her.
So he goes on an adventure. First, to the Valley (where her magical power-hungry lover dwells, where she raised her triplets); second, to the Jungle (where her queenly mother birthed her, where her dearly father loved her); third, to the Dale (for some reason unbeknownst to him, other than he’d never been there before and he felt some sort of tug in that direction). It is there that the broken-hearted lover wakes, under a small tree providing little shelter from the reaching claws of the winter cold.
He wakes and he breathes and he wishes he didn’t – couldn’t – breathe. Breathing meant he was alive and being alive meant he loved her and how could he love someone who was only a memory?