Each time the world ends, and it has ended so many times, Shahrizai is there to pick up the pieces of her heart, to keep them from turning to dust and blowing away in the wind. The first time had been what brought them together. When her home had burned and ash had fallen like dirty snow, she escaped to the meadow, reeking of soot and smoke and singed fur, and he had found her (they had found one another). They had stood together, entangled, trading touches and secrets and promises, and while it hadn’t been everything it had been enough to bind them, enough to pull them back into the forever they had since promised one another.
He had saved her every day since, every morning when she opened her eyes to trace the familiar blue of his quiet face, that solemnity he tried to keep contained in the bottoms of those dark eyes of his. He saved her with their family, their children, and again when their home of sand and sky was buried beneath the churning of an ocean.
So when she wakes and rises and finds herself alone on the mountain, finds that her favorite shade of blue is nowhere on the horizon, something breaks inside her chest. It is that first day all over again, the shards of glass where her heart should be, the pit of fear that pushes her away from the top and down into the valleys with the rest of them. She has no gifts to lose, no magic to be severed from, so she does not notice any change as she descends. Grief makes her wild, it makes sweat dampen the black of her neck and her sides heave with exertion, and still she continues her flight down the mountain, pushed ever on by the absence of blue.
The world is cold and white when she reaches the bottom, bitter and changed, and the air feels sharp as teeth in the places sweat darkened her skin. She is tired, and she is hurt, superficial wounds carved by the edges of sharp rocks that now leave smudges of pale pink in the snow behind her. But she cannot stop because she is not whole without him, because she is certain he is somewhere, and wherever he is is where she needs to be. So she walks until her head is drooped low, until there is ice beaded on the strands of her black and white mane, until at last she hears his voice (though it feels impossible and carved from a dream). But when she lifts her head and those pale near-gold eyes squint out into the churned white of a changed world, she finds his blue, finds his face, and she is whole again.
“Shah.” She stumbles across the distance to meet him, not slowing until she feels the familiar crush of his neck, the curve of the chest she has buried her face against every day for so many years. She trembles beside him, relieved when her mouth finds the beating of his heart so that she can memorize the rhythm and repeat it for him inside her own chest. “Shah,” she says again, pressing closer still because she cannot shake the feeling of what it was like to wake up and find him gone, find him stolen from her, “everything in my world keeps breaking, everything keeps falling apart.” She twists beneath him to touch her mouth to his jaw, to trace the lines of a face she knew better than her own. “Everything except you.”
I love you, she doesn’t say, because he will know it anyway, because what she feels for him is more than just words, more than just the way her body curls around him. What she feels is everything.
ILKA
makai x oksana
okay so this got e m o t i o n a l and i don't even know