"we pull apart the darkness while we can"
“No.” She told him in a quiet voice, a hollow voice, the kind of smoldering whisper reserved for speaking of ghosts and remembering nightmares.
He tried another command, fascinated.
“No.” She echoed again, those raw emerald eyes cutting holes through his thin face. She might have carved him if she could, carved him like he had, her.
She thought she saw a flash in his eyes, an instant where there was something besides the cruelty in his smile. But he commanded her one more time, one more time, if only to hear her say it again.
“I am finished.”
She blinked once, twice, and when she opened her eyes again it was to an expression of bored disinterest stretched across a pale, thin face. “You are no good to me if you stay now, Malis.” Grumbles said, and, lifting a pair of hands she had come to know well, he unleashed a swell of new magic to shoo her away.
It felt a little like suffocating, drowning, like being held in a dark she knew intimately. But it only lasted a moment, not like the lifetime she had spent alone in his dark tomb, and when she opened her eyes again it was to forests of the Chamber. It was disorienting to have traded one world for another in the span of a heartbeat, and even more disorienting to stumble forward and find her barrel more swollen with child than it had ever been before. For a long moment she paused, just a smudge of aching blue tucked away into the deepest shadows of the night where even the cold silver starlight couldn’t reach her. She might have stood there for hours, days, entire lifetimes, just waiting to be sure that this was real. How, how could this be real. But she remembers his words, the finality of his tone as he shooed her away with his magic.
Tension knots and unknots in her chest and she finds that she cannot remain still any longer. She has new ghosts, new nightmares, new impossibilities and already they slither inside to fill the dark places in her chest, to fill the cracks in her soul. She cannot think about what she has done, what he made her do, not until she is sure. She pushes forward through a forest, a kingdom, that is far more silent than she is used to and she can feel rising doubt like cold hands wrapped around her throat. The Chamber is empty, her warriors all gone. Her warriors, and her King. It is his absence that begins to unravel the blue mare, his absence that frays at her quiet until she is stumbling wild and graceless through the trees.
But a voice tangles in the branches, caught like a leaf in the wind, and she knows it immediately. In an instant she is ruined, torn. There is nothing more that she wants than to trace his call back to him, to disappear into the curve of his dark body and try to understand why she had been taken again, to understand whose children stretched and shifted within her bulging belly. They had to be his, only his. But she knows better now than to believe that the fairy is a figment of her nightmares, knows better than to believe that impossible things might be anything less than real. But even as she gives in and disappears into the sound of his voice, she remembers the dragon. She remembers the taste of his blood on her tongue, the wet sound his body made when she tore it apart.
She remembers, and she fissures.
But even in her ruin she is selfish, still greedy, and when the shape of the tall bay stallion appears between the trees ahead of her and she can see the smears of blood across his skin and the puckering of pink wounds, she forgets that she needs to protect him from herself. Instead she goes to him, slow with the size of her belly until she is close enough to press her mouth to his shoulder, until she is close enough to trace his wounds with quiet lips. Worry finds confusion in the pit of her stomach and they fuse together until she urgently, possessively, has had a chance to make sure none of the wounds buried in his flesh will kill him. Only then does she still beside him, pressing her nose to his neck and oh how she burns with her shame. “Killdare?” She whispers in a voice too ragged to love, a voice so brittle it barely sounds like her. But it matches the burns across her face, the ones left behind when the magic failed in the halter, when she finally, finally, stopped being a pawn. “What happened?” Was it me, she wonders, did the magic find you. And she knows that if she had any strength at all she would untangle herself from him, she would let him be, allow him some happiness. But she is weak and she is selfish, and so she touches her lips to the damp blood on his neck and she is certain that this, this is real.
MALIS
makai x oksana