let my shadows prove the sunshine
Maybe the next time his soul is plucked from his chest, by fate or by a god, he will welcome it with ease; maybe what causes him to tremble now will be at rest, leaving him to be taken away without the darkness of fear in the shadows of his blue eyes. Maybe he could accept it with grace, with dignity (with the knowing that nothing he could do will change it anyway). Svedka does not know the way she had met death already in multiples and his heart will surely break at the idea of it.
Even now, his heart aches and he cannot explain why. Fear, he decides, must be the reason his pulse races and shudders - for what else could it be? It is fear that lingers, that consumes him, that lounges so effortlessly in the pit of his stomach and the back of his throat. He calls it fear because what do you call something that you have no name for? With a breathy exhale, Svedka’s insides twist with something that is most certainly not fear, but the palomino stallion knows not what else to call it. It is something dark and terrible and out of place, that even her healing couldn’t touch.
Her reassurance brings his fear to a halt momentarily. His cerulean eyes flick towards her in one white-lashed blink while a frown finds the pale pink of his mouth. Svedka doesn’t press her on the very reasons she finds herself afraid - though he probably would find that he understands those reasons far more than he’d care to admit. Perhaps part of it is too painful to say aloud (and he would hate to be the one to bring more grief to her beautiful face), but also because he is not sure he could bear to hear those reasons, in fear that those would be his reasons as well.
“I think,” he muses softly, the tiniest curve of a smile on his lips, “I think I am glad he brought me back, too.” He’s unsure, of course, and that uncertainty resounds carefully in his otherwise gentle voice.
Ryatah’s twinkling laugh makes him turn his head towards her, searching to see the smile that graces her expression. It brings joy to his own face to see it, for in the light of her golden radiance it is all the sweeter. “I hope that is something I can still be,” he admits to her with a gentle touch of his muzzle to hers, feeling the warmth of her smile despite its inability to reach her eyes. “Do you think it’s possible?”
svedka
@[Ryatah]