Her heart sat like ice in her chest, too heavy, too cold, so frozen and all wrong. It was different before. Before the twins, before the purple stallion and the night that never should have been, before the Gates burned. Back when the world had been full of mystery and expectation and hope was still an unshattered warmth in her chest. But it was different now, the world had changed and it had tried to changer her, too, except she had gotten caught in the in-between with a heart too eager to love and a trust too broken to remember how.
She was stuck in a role she couldn’t fill, a life she had no idea how to live.
It wasn’t until the sun had risen high enough above the trees to leave golden dapples against the black of her skin that she realized how far she had wandered through the night. The twins were gone, the chamber was gone, and the ice in her chest felt a little lighter, a little warmer. But even the morning on her skin, the sun, the spring breeze, the promise of new and fresh and peace – it wasn’t enough to thaw the winter in her veins.
For a long moment she closed those gold eyes and turned her delicate face towards the sun. This was the first time she had left the shade of the chamber in months since the twins had been born, her beautiful independent magicians. It was impossible to think that they could be any part of her, but they were. Bone and blood and everything that mattered, they were hers.
All but love.
That was the only thing missing.
She could see it in their stone sharp little faces, in tiny eyes as bright as stars and filled with entire universes, heaven and earth. It was the way someone might look at their reflection. That is mine, only mine. It will never be yours, but I do not love it. I do not need to. It was an understanding that filled her with stones, kept her feet buried in the dirt long after her solemn eyes had opened and she had turned her face to look back in the direction of the place that wasn’t home.
She loved them, how could she not, but it felt like thorns buried in her chest.
ILKA
makai x oksana