She leaves him, falls through his cupped hands like water.
He doesn’t know what it is, he does whatever she asks. He devotes himself to her, travels with her to whatever worlds she conjures. He worships her, wretched and wonderful, but she stops meeting his eyes. She leaves, and he is unable to follow. She does not invite him to her kingdom, and he is left on the outskirts, in the meadow or river or forest, and sometimes she returns and then she doesn’t, and he is alone.
Alone is worse, now, because he knows what lies at the other end of the spectrum. Her touch, her smile, her eyes boring into him so hot he shivers. The solitude is worse, for he had grasped at something else, and it had slipped through him.

He’d known, of course, that she would grow tired of him. What could he offer? He has no powers, no particular strength, all he has a singular devotion, a wont to kneel. Amusing, perhaps, but nothing desirable for longer than a few months.
Still. Still. He wants to prolong it. One more time. Then one more.
Yet when she calls out, for a moment he freezes, as if her voice electrocutes him.
He goes. Of course he does. Towards to sound of her, the scent of her, then – oh! – the sight of her. He wants to smile, but the wrecked look of her face, the streak of tears on her cheeks, stops it.
“Kagerus,” he says, aching, “what’s happened?”

Of all the things he’d imagined, it wasn’t this.
There was a way of things. Ways the world worked he never questioned. While Rapt’s seen unnatural things, while he’s lived in wild worlds, he’s never questioned something so mundane as childbirth. His body is biologically incapable of such a thing, and thus, he’s never thought much of it.
But now –
Now she’s before him, sweat on her brow, stomach taut with a child that wasn’t meant to be. Asking him something impossible.
Of course he’d do this for her – he’d do anything for her – but he doesn’t have the faintest clue how. He’s stupid and useless in this body.

“How?” he asks. He hates that he has to ask. That she’s shaking and tense and laboring and he’s there, useless.
Tell me what to do.
He touches her. As if he could absorb the pain this way.
(He thinks it’s just pain. That that’s what frightens her. He doesn’t know of her curse, of her temporary immortality.)
“I’ll do anything,” he says. Promises. “Just tell me what I need to do.”

She goes, he follows.
From this world to the next, except there’s nothing magical about the world, it’s the same as ever.
Except then there’s a shifting, his body changing, warping. Anatomy upended, stomach stretching grotesquely as the child is shifted from her body to his, taken apart and put back together inside him. It hurts, the change – his body no longer his, changed and stolen by the impossible child, crushing his organs, dragging him down. The contraction hits then, following the child, nature eager to deliver the baby even in the most unnatural of circumstances.
He moans – pain has never mattered to him, but this pain is so bone deep, begot in the most inward, private places of him. His own body, changed, hurting, betraying –

The urge to push overwhelms him, and he bears down on his strange, warped stomach. Dirt sticks to his sweaty skin, mottling him. He cries out again, feeling the child inside him, the strange inner pressure of its body against his.
(At some point he wakes, but he doesn’t know he wakes. The remnants of the dream remain, his body changed. Not for long – but enough. Enough to see it through.)
He obeys the urges, pushes again and again and again and his muscle tremble, exhausted, and then the sensation changes as the child slides from him.
It’s a boy, he notes, as the child breaks through the sac. A son, gold and white, a perfect mix of them.
He’s suddenly aware he’s crying.
Still prone on the grass, he looks for her, to make sure she’s all right.
“Kagerus,” he says, soft, “we have a son.”

It’s been said before – Rapt is not a very smart boy.
He’s faithful to a fault, he’s pretty, he’s loving – but he’s not smart. Especially now, dazed in a new body, hormones flooding a body and mind not built for such things, looking at the child, slippery and slimy but oh-so-beautiful, because it’s his. Theirs. Their impossible, strange child, conceived in a dream, born on the edges of dreams.
(He’d never wanted to be a father. His own father was loving, but always looked at him strange, like he didn’t quite know what to do.)
If Rapt was smart, he’d see the disconnect, the way she looks at them but doesn’t see, the slight edginess of her. If Rapt was smart, he’d say something – the right thing – to assure her the child is theirs, wholly, that the strange way he’s come into the world doesn’t mean anything.
But he’s too busy staring at the son.

He doesn’t know he’ll say it until the name leaves his lips: “Abysm.”
For all those places the child was made. All those dreams. For the white place where she gave him monsters.
It’s a tribute, to her.
Rapt should know better.
He was never a very smart boy.