Soul as sweet as blood red jam

In the places where creeks became rivers, and rivers become oceans. Under the din of night-creatures and laughing starlight, they had rocked each other to sleep in the most delicious of ways. She was nieve (oh! How she cringed at the sound of that word, even in her private thoughts) to not assume that their reckless lovemaking would lead to this; the most primal of urges was a means to an end, after all. Biology always won. But that hadn't mattered as they licked the honey from it's the source, falling in love in lust by equal measure. 

But things have changed. She is as haggard as the icy summits of her birthplace, brittle and almost broken. She has no immortality to preserve the suppleness of her flesh, the vigor of her spirit. She is a shell, with few emotions or words to spare for the living.

It wouldn't take much to blow her away, but her next hour will not unmake her gently.

Vicious and quick, magnified by the relentless fever coursing through her veins, a burst of pain drives the young mare into the earth. 

the fuck,
The Fuck
THE FUCK

The final senseless curse breaking past the barrier of thought as a groan from her red and squalid lips. The girl twists as her abdomen siezes, and her breath catches in her tightening throat. 

"I can't do this," she confesses into the dark, no longer a warrior; no longer a princess. Her skeletal figure sinks, ready to be freed of her burden one way or another. The jagged ups-and-downs of her protruding ribs flex under her pregnant belly, the only part of her with any mass, as she sprawls across the black sand of the silver shores. 

She should have died, would have died, if it were not for Raul's magic. But moths had passed since she stopped seeing his skill as a gift. He strung her along with nightly doses of his healing, repairing what his could and paying with his own strength. She was little more than an incubator for the life which grew in her core.

It wasn't just for her - she knew that. But after tonight they didn't have to pretend like she would get better anymore. 

The space between her legs expands with a crack she feels in her bones. Her child is expelled in a wave of crimson. Rattled, shaking and empty, Will allows the jagged edges of her face fall to rest on the cool stones as her breathing slows.

Mothers die all the time.
Biology always won. 

They had fought her sickness with magic for long enough.