The hourglass is nearly empty; the feel of her nose against his reminds him of this.
He’s never brought another living being to the afterlife before (through time and space, abundantly), and he can feel his own magic crumbling like hardened clay. It hits him like a wave that breaks across his back, but instead of washing over him it soaks through his skin into his deepest pieces. He couldn’t keep her. Not today. Despite his every intentions their time together is drawing short.
He decides, then and there, that he will at least squeeze every ounce of her from these last few grains of sand.
“You’re alive. You would know where to find me.” She says, because she hasn’t seen his fangs or felt his bite, because she doesn’t know what he is capable of - what is reeling, quietly, in the back corners of his mind. For a moment afterwards he pauses to wonder if he can call what he does living, the way he loops again and again through time and space without meaning or reason. Existing, perhaps, was a more appropriate term. The thought, however, is cut short when Lepis moves to press her body against his shoulder and he doesn’t move away. Elektrum doesn’t usually give them this kind of power (to touch him as she pleases), but Lepis is getting away with more than most today.
“Do you like it?” She asks, pulling away and leaving his skin cold.
She doesn’t get far before she feels the haunt of this world; he sees the way her body trembles and folds in on itself. For a moment he is silent, weighing out the different options she might mean. Does he like this world? No - he hates it. Let it burn, and let the fire be so hot it eviscerates any hope of bringing Spyndle back out again, of falling into their doomed cycle even just one more time. Does he like the way she moves against him? How she fits against him like she belongs there? How her skin touches his skin and leaves it warm, for once?
He could learn to.
He is about to answer her (he doesn’t know with what) when her body curls against his again, when she asks for home in a voice that doesn’t seem like it could be her own.
When he asked her if she liked it, what he had meant was:
Do you like my power?
Do you like my greatness?
Because a battle is beginning inside of him that she won’t see reflected in the straight lines of his face. There are parts of him that crave her approval, parts that seek out her laughter, something that he hadn’t anticipated when he’d plucked her from the field concluding her weaker than the rest (and a truth that makes him decidedly sick with himself). And there are other parts - parts that resent her for these new feelings, parts that are still bitter from her ‘betrayal’, parts that unabashedly acknowledge him as the benevolent god he has become who could change the outcomes of his next decision if he only wanted to.
Those parts are bigger.
“Of course,” he reasons, slinking forwards so that his lips can find that same scar again. Lepis is right to think that no good will come of standing skin-to-skin with him, and she will learn it now. She can’t see the magic bleeding out of him as though he were a pierced artery. She doesn’t know he has no choice - that there time is up anyways.
Call it the call of the void, because he says then: “But there’s a price. There’s always a price.”
He has all of eternity to decide if he’ll let the guilt of this eat him alive.
ELEKTRUM
how time twines around your neck,
@[Lepis]