they drown us out at sea; any

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

She had come here once before, only once – though, not in the role of a recruiter. She would never be a charismatic diplomat, never a wordsmith capable of spinning enough poetry to convince a stranger of the worthwhile life that could await them should they choose to pick the Chamber as home. Killdare did not make her his queen for her qualities of charisma. She did not understand why he had at all, but she kept the dark at bay for him, kept the wild from blistering in her heart until it was all that remained. She would do so for as long as he asked it of her, for as long as the safety of the kingdom rested in her incapable hands.

There is something different about this day, though, be it fate or perhaps a pair of meddling twin magicians, and Malis surrenders eagerly to whatever it is that drives her restless heart to the edge of the waiting field. She does not enter right away, not until the sun has inched further across the sky and she can feel the raw heat pooling in the contrasting indigo hollows along her back and hips. It is only when that silhouette of damp gold, of a figure she recognizes in an impossible way, of a darkness that sings out to her appears in the shadows beneath a copse of trees that she understands.

She watches him in his roiling fury- but she isn’t the only one. There is a mare first, dark and silent as steel, and then a stallion in complete contrast with the first in the way that he glows like bone beneath the sun. She waits until they have all come together, collecting like dew in the belly of a leaf, before she crosses the winterscape to join them. They are different up close, different than gold and steel and pearl, different than her in the way she feels restless in the midst of so much unknown, so much of what she cannot control. She thinks they’ve all been here a thousand times before, because they settle in with a sort of familiarity that she cannot match. So she does not try. Her ears flick and her muscles slither like snakes beneath her skin, and when she turns her eyes from the mare to the stallion and then finally to Magnus, they are molten green emeralds.

“You’re back.” She says to him, quiet, and it isn’t a question at all. She doesn’t mean the field, back here, she means it in a wider way. The last time she had seen him had been in this very place, except the roles had been reversed and it had been Malis withering in the shadows. She had even agreed to see his home but he had disappeared shortly thereafter, against his will though she had no way of knowing this, so nothing had kept her bound to the Gates. She can smell the Kingdom on his skin now, and it makes her wonder too. But she is nothing like the bone-white stallion and she will not ask, not when she knows how she would ruin anyone who tried to pull her demons out into the light. To him, to the steel and silent mare she says instead, “I am Malis, of the Chamber.” She wouldn’t have introduced herself, wouldn’t have given them a name to wield against their tongues, but Killdare would have. So she does, too.

She is silent then, though she does not fix those emerald eyes on his face as the other two do. Instead she drifts as she always does, even now, letting her gaze slither in and out of the shadows nearby until the sound of voices draw her back in again. Unlike the others, warriors of their homes, defenders of the worlds they come from, Malis does not belong here. There is too much wild, too much dark and it simmers dangerously just beneath her skin in this unfamiliar closeness, this restrictive role. But there is reason she is here, a reason she came to find this face again, and so she remains.

MALIS

makai x oksana

texture © hexe78

omfg what even is this. D: