She stands quietly at the mouth of their shallow cave, a hollowed out hole in the side of a hill as though the hand of a giant had swept through it. It had been home since the moment Shahrizai noticed the swelling of her belly and the fullness beneath her hips. Even now, so many months later with Luster born and off exploring the nearby forest on her own, it was still home. Admittedly, though she loved their private little clearing buried in the deep of the woods, home was wherever Shah was. She needed nothing more than him and their ever-growing family.
When Luster’s blue silhouette slips between the trees and disappears into the white of the snowy wonderland outside, she cannot help the way her stomach knots with a worry that is both warranted and reflexive. But it was unfair to ask her to stay with them always, to give up wandering and exploring as children should do.
With a sigh, she turns to Shahrizai, stepping close enough to lay her cheek against the mottled blue of his shoulder. All at once she finds her worries eased, finds that the tension that had been buried in the hollows of her dark and white face softened until only a smile, small and uncertain, pulled at the corners of those delicate lips. “Good morning, Shah,” another quiet smile as she presses a kiss to the crook of his neck, “one day I won’t worry so much when she leaves to explore.”
But even as she says it she doesn’t believe it, and she expects that he does not either. There had been too much turmoil following this family – a war and a raid, a kingdom stolen away by the ocean, an entire world undone. She knew the knot in her stomach would stay there forever, that it was what it meant to love and be in love, to care about something so much that you would spare nothing to protect them.
It was the most beautiful burden.
She pauses and sighs again, pulling back just slightly so that those near-gold eyes are free to trace the angles of his dark, handsome face. Her brow furrows slightly, just a quirk of movement beneath the dark tangles of her forelock, and she reaches out to touch her lips to the hollow at the side of his steely mouth. “How did you sleep?” It is the ghosts she wonders about as she watches him now, the shadows she has seen swimming like fish in the back of his eyes. The things he doesn't speak of, and so she won't pry. But she cannot help but worry about him as she worries about all of them, and so, stepping close again, she moves to tuck herself beneath his neck and against the steel-blue of his waiting chest. "I love you, my Shahrizai." Then, she is quiet again, content to be tucked close against the beating of his heart.
ILKA
makai x oksana
<3 @[insane]