even angels have their wicked schemes

There was something befitting to the way fate had directed the circle of her life back to where it had all begun. Back to the sand, the stone, the sun-bleached bones. But that hadn’t been the beginning, not truly. There was life before that, there were faces and memories that slipped in and out of her nightmares like simmering smoke. But when the dreams faded, so did the glimpses of a past forced from her mind. She was left only with the hollowness of missing something, someone, a life she no longer deserved. Forcing the connections, chasing a memory as its tail disappeared into the dust, brought her in a confusing circle forged out of a false reality. Suddenly the smile that had seemed warm, that had felt like trapped sunshine in her chest, became the leering smile of the palomino magician who broke her bones like branches.

It had worked at first, this pattern she could only assume was deliberate, to keep her curiosity safely at bay. To keep her from seeking out a solution and ruining a game that would otherwise never have to end. A magician’s clever piece.  But with Caius, something had changed. He became a new anchor, a new tether, one she chose instead of one that drowned her at the bottom of the oceans depths. Caius was something that felt safe in a ruined world. Before, there had been fear and doubt and a desperate urge to run away and leave everything behind. It had been Caius that held her back, the unwillingness to lose the first thing that hadn’t poisoned her with uncertainty. The first one to replace those haunting memories with something warm, something light. And then he gave her the world, he gave her Elanor.

When Elanor was born, something else had been born beside her. A fierceness that wasn’t there before, not in the before that Else could still remember. The change was subtle, so subtle, but she felt it every time her eye traced the softness in Elanor’s quiet expression, each time she followed the curve of that gentle smile. It felt like a memory, not a memory of one particular moment in time, but a memory of who she should have been. Of who she was before.

The ocean coaxes her from the shore and she obeys it willingly, wading into the glossy black water up to her shoulders. In the last few weeks, she had come here every night, wading as far as she needed until her reflection disappeared in the waves beneath her chin. From here she could see in the distance the place she had first stumbled upon, the first place. She didn’t need to see the bones scattering the shore, bobbing beneath the waves, to recognize it. That was a memory hung like a painting on a wall. Of course he had let her keep that one. She didn’t know why she had gone to the dying place, the dead place, but she did remember what had happened there and no amount of ocean would ever wash her of that memory.

She felt a pang of sorrow tear into her chest and bleed uncertainty into the water as the sun dipped just barely beneath the horizon. Over the past several nights spent with her shattered reflection in the ripple of the waves, Else had come to a decision. It was one that terrified her, and she couldn’t tell if those feelings were her own, or ones the magician had put inside her.

“I need to know.” She whispered into the approaching night, the confession sinking like stones beneath the churning waves.

even angels have their wicked schemes

Hooves crunched in the sand along the shore and she turned quickly in the water to trace the silhouette with a flicker of suspicion burrowing into the mangled notches of her ruined face. It was a familiar shape, and it wasn’t, it lacked the wings she had grown accustomed to seeing, the blood-scent she had grown used to smelling. But it was Caius, she was sure of it. Hastily she chanced one last furrowed glance back towards where the Beach sat in the distant darkness and then hurried out of the waves to meet him halfway on the drier shore. She didn’t want him to know what she’d been doing – not because she had a habit of keeping secrets from him, but because she didn’t want to invite any more ghosts into his restless nights.

Her chest trembled and her skin shivered as she drew alongside him in the dark. Her eye moved immediately to his back, to the twin wounds nestled against the smooth black. Her stomach lurched and bile rose in the back of her throat. The craters reminded her of how the ground looked after a storm uprooted a tree from its resting place. Yet, there was something about the way the blood pooled and congealed in the lip of the nearest wound, about the way flesh had been torn from flesh and now refused to heal that seemed achingly familiar. Her muzzle lifted cautiously to the wound, her nose smearing a thin trail of blood that had seeped over the edge of the wound. It left a stain of burgundy across the scarred side of her nose but she didn’t notice.

“What happened?” Her voice was just a whisper of sound, an apology etched into the darkness as she realized how long she had been gone this time, how much she must have missed.

But she shakes her head at his question, her heart stuttering with quiet anxiety at the way he’s draped in the metallic stink of blood and a sourness that warned of infection. Suddenly her desire to unravel those fragile secrets, the jagged pieces of her past, paled in comparison to the disorienting gore of his wounds. She wants to promise him that she won’t leave again, won’t disappear with the stars when the sun touches the horizon, but there is only a silence laced with guilt when that knotted half-face lifts to his. He deserves something more than her pocked and ugly love, something whole, something that wouldn’t turn ruinous when their ghosts came to find them. But she’s too selfish to tell him, too selfish to push away the realest thing she knows for sure. Instead she takes the tangles of his impossibly dark mane in her lips and buries her cheek against the crook of his warm neck.