"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
She does not remember much from the time spent in the dark.
She remembers being too weak to stand most days, and too weak to even open her eyes on others.
She remembers her mother trying to heal her, and how it kept her just barely hanging on, clinging to a promise that the sun would come back soon and she would not have to fight this hard forever.
That first day when the sun finally did breach the darkness felt like someone breathing life directly into her lungs, like someone had injected a shimmering light into her veins. She could not even compare it to being born again, because she had been born into darkness and fragility. No, it felt like being born for the first time, to see the world washed in golden light and to feel the way it seemed to seep beneath her skin and pooled into the core of her.
It took weeks for her to gain enough strength to travel, but once she can, she goes north—searching for the impossibly dense forest her mother said existed.
When she was younger and weak she had nothing to go off except her mother’s stories. She could not see this wide world for herself, and even if she could it only would have been cloaked in darkness, anyway. She asked Ryatah to weave her stories, to paint her a world of color and light, to give her something to dream about besides death and darkness. And she does—telling her of far-off jungles and shores that did not belong to Beqanna, and then the valleys and dales that once did, but now crumbled to dust.
There are galaxies and illusions and other stories of her father, though unbeknown to her most of those are glossed over or watered down, and stories of a chamber with a heart that pulsed beneath it—Ryatah’s own stories of romance, spun to appeal to her daughter’s imagination.
And there was Taiga, too, with trees that grew so tall they blocked out the sun, and shadows that came alive.
Taiga seemed closer than galaxies and lost kingdoms, and armed only with the light she now harbored inside of herself she had followed a path north, walking until the mountainous region of Hyaline shifted into a dense forest.
The trees started out sparsely at first, and Este walked easily through the dappled light that strained through the tops of them. It was only marginally warmer here than it was in Hyaline, but the landscape itself was different enough to keep her captivated. So much so that she did not realize the trees were growing taller and closer together, or that the sunlight from above was starting to dim as it struggled now to penetrate the canopy. Darkness stretches across her now, and while she could have called upon her light she chooses to wait, letting the shadows settle onto her shoulders, wanting to feel what their weight is like when they do not have the power to kill her.
She was an angel of the light once trapped in the dark, and instead of staying away from it she goes back to it, smiling.
When she finds him, it is entirely by accident.
He materializes from the darkness, cloaked in shadow, with the white parts of him glowing like a million stars had chosen to make their home against his skin. She gasps in surprise, her dark brown eyes widening, and without meaning to, she begins to glow—not warm and golden like her mother, but instead a radiant rose-gold that emanates softly from her dove-gray body, illuminating the similarly colored dapples that lay scattered across her shoulders and back.
She is about to leave, to hope that if perhaps she simply tucked her chin and quietly slipped away that he would not follow, when her eyes catch the gold of his own.
The familiarity strikes her so immediately that she is frozen where she stands.
When at last she smiles it is small and shy, her voice a breathy whisper when she says, “It’s you.”
She steps forward, no longer afraid, looking up at him from beneath doe-like lashes and a look of unmistakable wonder on her young face. “I remember you, from that day in Hyaline. There was a storm,” she does not know why she is desperate for him to remember, perhaps because she herself is not so convinced that it had not been another fever dream—a stranger standing over her, but she was far too weak to even say anything to him. She just remembers he was dark with skin that looked like it had been kissed by frost, and with eyes a shade of gold that she had known, even then, there was nothing in the natural world to compare them to.
“I know I was so sick, and you look different now from how I remember you that day but,” she pauses, shaking her silver head with a soft, wispy laugh, “I would recognize your eyes anywhere.”
WHO COULD EVER LEAVE ME DARLING, BUT WHO COULD STAY?
He stands shrouded in night despite that it is midday and the sun still sits high in the sky somewhere up above these ancient trees. Above, there is bright aching blue sky and sunlight that pools molten in the surface of everything it touches. There is day and light and bright, and he knows that the shadows are thin yet, mostly hidden beneath their solid pair. But down here beneath the cover of the forest, he has crafted the dark into night. There are stars that roost in the branches of the trees, stars that float like snow, untethered from whatever moorings keep them bound to their midnight prisons. They are different than the ones that glitter against the gauzy dark of his skin, different even than the glowing effervescent dust that clings to a mane no longer obedient to gravity. He has not grown used to the way it floats over his skin and in his periphery.
His eyes are on a sphere of light that some innate part of him knows to be moonlight. But the impossibility of that jars against his logic as he wills the light close enough that, should he have any desire to, he could reach out and touch it. He is entirely still though, quiet in his study of this sphere now crafting itself through the direction of his thoughts into something that looks as pitted and imperfect as the moon he’s seen in every night sky. It would be easiest to believe that he was losing his mind, finally, if not for the way the lunaflies have shed the shadows to flutter silently through that sleepy silver light.
He doesn’t realize he has company until the sound of that delicate gasp drags him from the depths of his thoughts. She is small and slender in a way that reminds him of the white-tailed does that occasionally startle from his path when he draws too near, especially when those liquid-dark eyes go wide and round at the very sight of him. He says nothing, only faintly curious at her presence at all until that glow bleeds from her skin in a shade of shining pink he has seen nowhere else. It is reflexive when he winces away from her light, shifting a few steps deeper into the shadows where it cannot reach him, where he cannot feel the bright of it burning through the dark of him.
It’s you.
His mouth is a sudden frown, his golden eyes forced blank of the confusion that wells up inside his mind. He is absolutely certain he does not know her. But she is sure enough that she steps closer, sure enough that he can see the fear bleed away from her features to leave only that shy smile behind. He does not retreat from her light this time. “It’s me.” He agrees, and then she speaks again and he finds himself suddenly lost in the memory of Hyaline in a storm, of Ryatah and that pain she had discovered inside his chest, of a girl nearly dead from the weight of the dark he craved. He had tried to pry the night from her skin, to coax those shadows away. But there had been no light to find her in the absence, only more shadow. He blinks, and his face is carved stone, something still and cool and entirely silent while she speaks again.
“You look different too.” He says when she is quiet again, though what he wants to ask is how she could possibly know him when he’d thought she had been too weak to even lift her dying head to see him. She must have, though. Despite every last instinct not to, he moves closer to her in the dark, close enough to study those dark eyes that are both familiar and not, hers and echo of someone he does not want to think about. “What else do you remember?” He asks, and for her his voice is something softer, something that might be kind if not for all that jagged dark inside his chest. But the dark in him loves her. She is delicate and gentle, and there is such tentative warmth in her eyes when she looks at him, something too much like trust and whatever ancient thing inside him had been shattered by Violence yearns to shatter her in the same way. It is only ever just barely within his self control to keep it quiet.
It takes everything inside him not to reach out and let the dark, his night, move like a caress across her glowing skin. To know what the burn of this rose-gold light will feel like should he ever let her close this distance between them, this necessary divide. “She never told me your name.” He says, and his mane is stardust drifting across the hazy dark of his midnight skin. “Did she tell you mine?” He is so close to her now, so on the verge of something even he is not brave enough to look into the eyes of.
She realizes this, belatedly, but other than a heat that flushes her cheeks she does not stop herself. Her doe-like eyes are locked on his face, and they only divert to sweep across the rest of him. He is so much more than she remembered, and she finds herself cursing her fevered memory. He has haunted her dreams, but not even her dreams have done him justice; they watered him down, drunkenly blurred his edges, and she sees that all with a stark clarity. The way she tries to commit him to memory is nearly desperate, as if this is the only chance she will have to see him, because she is so sure he will disappear into the dark again.
And so she memorizes all of him in the fleeting moments in which he allows her to stare at him—moments that last mere heartbeats but feel like years; an eternity that is over the moment she blinks her eyes.
There is the ring of silver around his pupil that is nearly hidden by the molten gold, and the way his mane is spun of nightfall and stardust; the way his lips pull into a frown and his face becomes unreadable, but all she can do is wonder what he hides beneath that shadowed exterior.
He is dark and she is light, but she does not see how anything as stunning as him could ever crush her the way the endless night had.
Only, he retreats from her light, and she feels her heart squeeze in her chest with hurt and shame. She has never experienced any kind of rejection, but she recognizes that perhaps it had been foolish of her to think someone made entirely of the dark would want to be around someone only meant for the light. The rosy glow is noticeably subdued, only a faint blush that mostly keeps to her dapples. She wants to apologize to him, but it catches in her throat at the way his voice seems to soften when he asks her a question. “I don’t remember much. I just remember you were there, and I knew I didn’t have to be afraid of you.”
When he steps forward again she can feel her skin begin to warm, but she locks away her remaining light, ensuring that it cannot find a way out of her skin. She lets herself succumb to the night that he has cast around himself, and when she looks at him with her searching stare it is approval she is looking for—for any kind of reassurance that this is what he was silently asking for, to diminish her light so that she might see his night in its entirety. Her gaze lifts to look in wonder at the stars he has planted in the tree branches, to the ones that drift lazily around them, but always, her eyes are drawn back to his handsome face.
“Este,” she breathes around the wistful excitement in her chest, her young heart fluttering. “She told me your name is Illum, and that you saved her, once.” There is a pause, eyes still flickering across his own, as she gathers her courage to ask him quietly, hopefully, “Were you trying to save me, too?”
WHO COULD EVER LEAVE ME DARLING, BUT WHO COULD STAY?
She makes it so easy for him to turn back towards the dark, back to that thing inside his chest that he has been at war with for so long. She is gentle eyes and a gentle smile, she is a hand outstretched from the shadows that he does not want to venture back into - yet when he looks into that delicate face all soft with earnest wonder, something inside him turns to dust.
His sanity, his resolve, his goodness.
He watches the light across her soft skin dim until it is something even more faint than the most distant stars strewn across a twilight sky - and he knows he should tell her not to do that, not to care so much what he thinks and he feels, but this is power she gives to him and he is not immune to it like he had grown to believe. To pretend, even with himself. The faintness of her strangled light stirs something primal in his belly, not desire but perhaps satisfaction at her willingness to be perfect for him. To surrender herself into something he might like. He should recoil at this, should be better than the dark creeping behind his eyes, but he is a decade of brokenness and she looks at him like he is the light that let her live.
“Are you sure?” He asks of her quiet truth, of her faith in him, this belief that she did not have to be afraid of him. “Was it not the dark that bled you empty? Not the night that kept you shackled inside a dying body?” The words themselves are something sharp, like blades traced point-down over the constellation of glowing dapples across her delicate chest - but her gentleness is a light that keeps him at bay, an armor she does not realize she needs to wear.
Until it, until she goes dark for him.
It is submission, it is surrender, it is enough to rile the dark in him to a roar he cannot think over. The night sweeps in against her skin, a hazy starless dark that touches every silent metallic dapple on her glowless skin. He does not consider if this will hurt her because he cannot think beyond wondering how far this willingness extends. “Este.” He breathes, and when his eyes find hers again they are fully silver, completely molten, cold as any distant star and just as beautiful. “How can the night save you from the dark?” He wonders, not answering her question as he slips closer to her in the dark, close enough to feel the warmth of her soft skin. “How can I do anything except hurt you?”
The truth of his question unsteadies him for an instant, like a slap across the face to remind him of what he is and what he’s doing. He balks, and the night pulls away from her skin like a tide of shadow, pooling thickly around his body as he stares wordlessly at her. He traces her delicate face, tries not to notice the wonder in her gaze or acknowledge the way it seduces his dark closer again, the way her innocence is a beacon to his brokenness. “I tried.” He says quietly, watching stars settle like fireflies around her skin, floating in weightless, perpetual motion as they revolve around her quiet gravity.
“The better question, Este,” he says with such murmured quiet, his mouth waiting above the dapples of her delicate neck, “is who will save me from you.” Then, because he cannot stop it, his lips fall to the warmth of her dimmed skin, to the metallic pink shimmers he traces only for the sake of feeling her tremble beneath his touch. “Show me the light again, love.” And it is such an empty word, though he is sure she will not notice with the way it was whispered into the pulse at the curve of her throat.
“The night does not bother me,” she tells him with a softened eagerness, as if she needs to reassure him that she can survive in the dark, that she is not so fragile that she could not bear it for even a few hours. “It’s only when the night does not end that I get sick, like during the eclipse.” She does not think it possible that his darkness—this beautiful night sky that he carries with him, and the silver stars he suspends in the trees—could hurt her. His night is enchanting and sparkling, and nothing at all like the crushing dark of the eclipse that had pressed the life nearly out of her chest. “I do fine in the dark, now,” she continues quietly, her doe-eyes locked to his hopefully, searching for any sign of give in his hardened face, looking for a sign that he did not believe her unable to withstand darkness for any length of time.
She wants to tell him that she has her light that she carries with her.
She wants to show him that brilliant glow of hers, that sunshine that she locks inside of herself and turns it back into the world rose gold and lovely.
She wants to show him that he can wrap her up in his night and that she will be just fine, but she is afraid that somehow her light will drive him away, and so she says nothing.
“Your night is nothing like the dark from before,” she finally voices her earlier thoughts out loud, desperate to make him see. He has stepped closer to her and the way her knees feel weak has nothing to do with the dark around them; she welcomes it, wants to feel the weight of it. “I’m not afraid of it, or of you.”
He keeps getting closer and her heart keeps beating harder, and by the time his mouth touches her warm shoulder she nearly crumbles. She trembles just the way that he had wanted, her skin flushing so hot she thinks it a wonder it does not burn him, thinks there is no way he could not feel the way she is about to fall apart beneath his lips. No one has ever touched her in any way close to this, and she can imagine herself reaching out to touch him back, to run her mouth along the curve of his neck. She wants to, but she is afraid that somehow her touching him will shatter this dream-like state they are in.
She almost does not hear him when he says show me the light again, love, but she responds to it anyway, as if her mind and body was designed for him.
It is dim at first, gradual as the rising sun. The light spills from her, steadily increasing, until the brightness of it can nearly swallow this night that he has crafted for them. She did not mean to let it light up the dark in such a way, but she finds that she has little to no control over anything that she does anymore, because when the light fades away, she too has changed. A ring of rose gold light remains illuminated above her head, and a pair of angel wings made of the same silver-gray and rose-gold as the rest of her envelope her sides. All around her a soft aura of rose gold continues to glow, and she is breathless and wide-eyed when she looks at him, as if she is just waking from a dream and is surprised to find herself in this state.
She does not move from where she stands, still staring at him as if she is awaiting his judgement, and something that he had said earlier that had been lost in the haze is recalled, and she asks him in that soft, innocent way of hers, “Why would you need saving from me?”
WHO COULD EVER LEAVE ME DARLING, BUT WHO COULD STAY?
There is something dangerous about the way her softness makes something inside his chest clench tight like a fist. She is everything delicate and fragile, everything he can only ruin with the stain of his creeping dark. Yet when he touches his lips to her skin and she trembles beneath him with all the sweet uncertainty of a timid doe, he is slaved to her. His mouth does not leave her skin, not even when he can feel the heat of a blush creep beneath the rose gold dapples that taste of wretched salvation. “Este.” He breathes, and his mouth wanders further, a kiss of midnight and silver stars, of a creeping cold he can already imagine dragging more shivers from the curve of such a slender spine.
He is quite certain he would have taken more, but she is nothing if not obedient and suddenly his night is being pushed back by a dawn of light she pulls forth from someplace deep inside her. From the gentle way she had watched him, those earnest smiles and too-innocent eyes, he would have expected her light to be something shy and lacking, something more like a hazy glow. But the light the burns from her strikes him with such an intensity that it is impossible not to stagger back from it with a startled swear, to stagger back from her as she burns away at the dark of him.
He knows he should hate it, should be disgusted by the way this girl makes him so effortlessly weak. But when the light fades again and leaves an angel in its wake, there is no room for anything but this gaping wound inside his chest, this ache that reminds him he hasn’t been alive in a long, long while. That he doesn’t deserve to be alive, not when someone like this is looking up into his face with eyes so wide and worried and full of gentle trust. Not when he knows he is only capable of taking things she should not give to him.
His eyes are something dark and furious as he steps to her again, shifting from blank and empty to a gold as volatile as the flash of lightning between storm clouds. He hates her for coming here, for finding him. Hates Ryatah for letting her believe there was some kind of worthiness in him, something worth coming here to know. Because now time cannot be undone. He cannot unremember these wide brown eyes, cannot unremember the way she trembles when his midnight lips taste the color of her earnestness.
“Goddamnit Este.” He is no longer the beautiful night, no longer something of summer twilight and stretching constellations, no longer the illusion of sparkling enchantment. He is the cold dark that stretches between stars. He is the lonely midnight that finds you awake and restless and lost. But his voice lacks the fury of his eyes, and when he reaches her it is as an erosion of man and pain and darkness, of loathing and secrets and this burning desire to keep her when he has been able to keep nothing else. He is whispering, he is trying to be still and stoic, to be empty even while she is so much.
“Haven’t you ever noticed the way dark retreats from the light?” He asks, taking that final step so that his mouth is at the curve of her jaw and then beside the pulse at the soft place just above her throat. “Haven’t you noticed that no matter where you stand, your shadow is always hiding behind you from the sun?” He kisses the flutter of her pulse, keeps his eyes off that halo where it sits like a crown above her delicate ears. “If you are the sun, Este, then where do I go to hide.”
His mouth is cool against her skin, tracing a stardust path over the rose gold dapples all the way to the muscle at the base of her wings which he greets with the press of his teeth. He is no stranger to the unique pleasure of having one's wings touched, to the sensation of feathers ruffled and caressed, but he thinks she might be and so he would like to show her. “How unafraid?” He wonders, and his touch turns to shadow he threads gently through the roots of her feathers against the heat of her tender skin. “What if there were no stars to see by? No light.” Except, even as a torrent of pure shadow spills from him and fills the space of the clearing completely, he can feel it revolt against that sweet, hazy light of her aura.
It is indescribable, the way that he touches her.
The way he makes her feel beautiful and worthy beneath his lips, like his mouth can shape her into something strong and lovely rather than the weak and mild girl she has always been. There is something wrong in that, she thinks, to let his touch be where she derives her strength, because then what will she be without it? What will happen when he fades away and takes his night with him, leaving her to crumble to dust at the light of her own dawn?
She knows, in that moment, that she would have let him touch all of her. He could have taken her and she would not think to tell him no, would not have considered how tangled their lives already were and how much worse she was going to make it by not pulling away. He could have laid claim to her in any way that he wished and there is a not so secret part of her that wishes he would.
But he is looking at her now in a way she cannot decipher, staring at her halo and her wings, and she feels regret burning in the back of her throat. She does not fully understand the relationship between this man and her mother, but the way that he looks at her now makes her wish, more than anything, that she was not an angel. She is more angelic than her mother in many ways, though perhaps not nearly as grand in appearance—but there is an innocence and a light to her that Ryatah never could possess, something genuinely pure that the world had not yet defiled. She hates the way he is looking at her, though, like he cannot stand to see the halo above her head, like he had planned to go the rest of his life without crossing paths with another angel.
She is frozen by his molten silver eyes, though, unable to shift back into that doe-like and unassuming girl, and she can do nothing but stare back at him, shining and rose-gold, and when he closes the space between them and presses his lips to her throat she releases a trembling sigh of relief.
Her tongue cannot form answers to his questions, not when her pulse is too busy trying to beat through her skin to get closer to his touch. Instead she tentatively reaches forward, brushes her own soft mouth against his shoulder. What she finds causes her to inhale sharp and soft, and she almost pulls away. She is not sure what she thought he would feel like—she hadn’t been able to properly imagine what night would feel like, but she has been trying to figure it out from the moment she saw him. She reaches for him again, her warm lips again caressing against his shoulder, marveling at the way his skin seems to shift beneath her touch like rippling silk. “I never knew what the night would feel like,” she tells him quietly, heat still burning beneath her skin, afraid to look at him, afraid that he will see how unsure and terrified she is. “It’s just as beautiful as I imagined.” She hesitates, a slow smile on her lips that is kept hidden with her face still so close to his shoulder. “You are just as beautiful as I imagined.”
There is another shudder that takes over her spine when he touches the base of her wing, and she bites back the quiet moan-like sound that builds in her throat at the feel of his shadows twining through her blush-colored feathers. She wants to pull away and wants to press herself closer, she wants to run and wants to never leave. Her mind is a hum of electricity that she cannot think around, a fog that she cannot see through, and she almost does not notice the way darkness suddenly spills from him, suffocating the stars and the stardust and leaving only her gentle glow.
She is afraid, but she is not afraid of him, not even in the dark.
She is afraid how easily he could shatter her apart, and how willing she is to let him, and she thinks, maybe for the first time, that she understands why her mother goes back to her father time and time again.
“Then I guess we will just be in the dark,” she whispers, and slowly her light fades entirely, and she lets his night consume them both.
WHO COULD EVER LEAVE ME DARLING, BUT WHO COULD STAY?
