Ilka had long since abandoned the Gates. The last time she had been there was when the kingdom had still been rebuilding, finding order in the chaos that seemed to drown them in shadow and grief. It had been when Ledger shifted suddenly into a polar bear and his claws had buried themselves in the skin down her neck and across her chest. Even now after so much time, the scars were still narrow streaks of puckered pink skin buried in the satin black of her dark fur. It had been a very long time since the wound had actually hurt, but sometimes she still woke from a dream, gasping as a pair of white clawed feet carved her heart out of her chest.
The guilt in Ledgers face when he shifted back into a horse had been unbearable, the pain and blame and self-loathe. It had driven her from the quiet, ashy kingdom just as soon as the jagged wounds had healed. Ilka could not bear to be a constant reminder of something he had never meant to do.
It was easier to leave.
She was good at running away.
But the escape she found, the purple stallion who had been blue at first with chocolate brown eyes and a face she trusted, was not the escape she had been looking for. She was still not convinced that she hadn’t imagined it all, that he had ever been anything other than purple and wolfish and dangerously sharp. Cold like silver stars hung in the sky, cold like their children, her two 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.
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 a knowledge she felt constantly, like a blade wedged in her chest and she could barely remember how to breathe around it.
The forest was unrelentingly cold and snow fell through the leafless branches of bare, skeletal trees. In some places water had pooled around the bases of the trees and ice raced bright and slick across a nearly enameled surface. She continued further still, disappearing into the shadows of vast pine trees whose needles refused to acknowledge winters bite. It was here that a shape seemed to bleed out of the dark, blue with chocolate eyes and a face she trusted. She could feel her breathing change, a tiny shudder of uncertainty sending puffs like ghosts into the cold air between them. Seconds stretched into days and she refused to blink in case the purple seeped from impossible cracks in the mottled blue of his skin. But nothing happened, no purple, no wolf, just the same pair of eyes she had sunk into so readily so long ago in the meadow.
“Shah?” She asked quietly, anchored in place despite the growing need in her belly to be tucked back against his chest where everything was safe and right and nothing hurt. But instead she watched him with those bruised gold eyes and a tremble racing along her jaw. “This world isn’t what I thought it would be.” She inched forward one single step, her words crumbling at the edges.
ILKA
makai x oksana