The world is not the same.

It has not been the same since Beqanna imploded and drew itself in. Since it spit itself out, reformed and reimagined. But the world is not different because of these things. It is not different because of the years that it took for her to regain her magic that was not magic—that deafening silence that she carried within her—but rather because of what happened in tandem. That boy born of a magician who wove Fear into Etro’s heart. The boy who had sucked in air and left her passed out on the Mountain to find his first kill just a few hours into life, striking Fear into the heart of an innocent women and pulling the life from her.

And she powerless to stop it.

The world is not the same, but she is, in many ways, exactly who she has always been.

She is muddy and unremarkable, her hips sloping at awkward angles, the impossible blending of breeds leading to an impossible tangle of too long limbs and wide chest and plain face. She is neither the metallic beauty of her Akhal Teke mother or the foreboding power of her Percheron father.

She’s just Etro.

She’s just Etro and there are still constellations that spin through her veins. There are galaxies trapped in her mouth, impossible dynasties rising on her tongue and trailing behind her. And there is still him at the center of it all. The impossible monster with crackling lava skin and smoke curling from his nostrils.

He who she had promised she would think of. And she has. Oh, he is often all she thinks about. When she wanders this land that is home but no longer home. The land where her parents do not call out to her and her family does not pass her by and there are no Deserts for her to run to when it all gets too loud.

The only thing that keeps her anchored here at all is the idea of him.

The memory of him.

So when she sees him tonight, so similar after all of these years, she doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, cannot find the power in her to do anything but stare—eyes widening beneath the matted mess of her forelock, lips parting ever so slightly to draw in a rattled breath. It is impossible, and yet—

And yet it is not, because he is here.

He is here and she does nothing but watch.

Etro is not blind. Etro knows exactly what he is. What he does.

She knows that when she leans in, she is only pressing the knife into her belly. She knows that when she skims her mouth over the dangerous edges of his knife that poison is coating her lips. She knows that she dances with darkness whenever she is with him, that she is inviting into her life, trapping it in her breast.

But she doesn’t care.

She has never cared.

Her breath is trapped in her throat, the wings of her pulse fluttering on the edges, and she is trapped in the steel of his shark eyes as certainly as if she was the mangled bones at his feet. She doesn’t move as he begins to make his way toward her, as he cuts his path through the snow, the edges of it melting and folding away. She just watches him, wondering at how time has not seemed to touch him, at how he looks as if he had simply stepped away and out from her own memories, as certain and unchanging as heaven.

Rather, perhaps, as certain and unchanging as hell.

But she does not have forever to spend suspended in her own disbelief, her own joy, because his presence pierces her own bubble and he is near her, as silent and sullen and normal as she remembers.

And she forgets herself.

She closes the distance between them, a soft cry escaping her mouth—the sound lyrical and lifting. She presses into the ash of him, unafraid of how he might retaliate, only able to remember how she had once embraced the Gift Giver in the same way when his gifts had blinded her to reality.

But this is not a trick. This is not a lie.

This is him, and it is her, and she can taste the charcoal of him on her tongue.

He may dream of ending her, she knows, and she doesn’t bother to hide her throat. She just leans up, running her ruddy lips against the angle of his jaw, breathing in the familiar scent of sulphur and the coppery scent that she chooses to ignore. Just as she ignored that which laid at his feet.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter.

Nothing matters but the closeness of him, and she breathes out a sigh. “Kingslay,” his name a prayer on her lips, a prayer that has lived for years on the tip of her tongue and is finally realized.

“Kingslay.”

She is not surprised when she feels the pressure of his teeth against her, when she feels the way his mouth wraps around her throat, the threat of it clear and writ into the moment. She should be surprised, but she is not, and she doesn’t move; she doesn’t fight the moment, doesn’t fight the pressure, the way that he hungers for her blood to spill silver across the muddy meadow floor. She has known from the very beginning who and what he is. She had known from the first time they met, the coppery tang in the air biting into her conscious, of the blade in his hand.

So she doesn’t fight it—doesn’t pretend that this was not always where this was meant to go.

Instead she just takes a deep breath, tipping her head back so that she can look at the stars, so that she can take in the heavens, relishing this moment where he takes his life between his teeth and cradles it instead of crushes it.

“I am,” she whispers to his mumbled question, the motion of her voice causing her throat to ripple between his teeth, the pressure uncomfortable but not unwelcomed. “I always think of you, Kingslay.” She wonders how many different ways he has imagining undoing her. How many different ways he has seen her strewn across the floor, her heart taken apart and still beating for him, forever beating for a monster who does not know how to love in return.

For a moment, she imagines that she feels the heat of him increase, his teeth warming and she doesn’t reach for her gifts any more than normal—does not wield it as a weapon like she had against the Gift Giver—but still, its smothering effect calms whatever brews beneath his flesh. “You can, you know,” she finally says, her eyes still on the sky above them, her pulse slow and looping. “You can take my life, if that’s what you want.” Part of her wishes that she could look him in the eye while she says it, but she supposes that if she is going to lay it down before him, it doesn’t matter.

“It’s always been yours to take anyway.”

His words should cause her soul to crumble. They should cause her to thrash in agony, coming apart at the cruelty, breaking beneath his heel. She is but a silly girl, after all, and her heart beats for him—it beats for him and he has discarded it, he has tossed it to the side, so callously shrugging off her offering.

And there is a part of her that recoils from it, shuddering within her, seeking shelter from the hard edges of the monster that she has always loved. There is part of her that nearly turns and runs, turning on her haunches and racing toward a skyline where nothing awaits her—no family, no home, no love.

But, she has never been ordinary and she doesn’t respond normally. She doesn’t flinch and no tears stream down her cheeks. Instead, she laughs, the sound silver bells—rippling as it escapes her mouth and swells in the space between them. She shakes her head with mirth, plain lips upturned into a hint of a smile.

“Of course you have,” is all she says, because she has seen the way that their souls have collided, she has seen the explosion that it detonated, the constellations burning between them. She watched it in the Deserts and in the meadow and she watches it now. She has always known the truth of it, and regardless of the space and time that stretches between the detonations, she recognizes the purity of it.

She doesn’t fear the fire and the fire of him.

She doesn’t tremble before the icy indifference.

She sees straight to the core of it, and she looks there now, her plain muddy eyes piercing him as she watches, her gaze both sharp and loose, a casual hand keeping control of the conversation. “You can’t lie to me, Kingslay,” her voice is softer now and for a moment, she almost takes a step toward him, forcing him to live within her immediate proximity, but she doesn’t. She lets him have his space.

“I’ve wanted you,” she confesses, although it doesn’t feel like a confession when it is so obvious. “I have always wanted you.” She laughs again, shaking her head and looking upward to the heavens that reel as they look down on them. “I remember when we first met,” the memory causes an ache to spread in her. “I would have sacrificed everything for you—right then and there. My family. My home. My birthright.”

It didn’t matter that she was to be a princess.

It didn’t matter that she was part of a loving home, the powerful kingdom spread out before her.

None of it had mattered from the second he had stepped into her life.

“I loved you immediately,” another truth, almost casually handed to him.

"I suppose I will always love you."

Let him do with that what he will. Let him live with it.

Etro has no expectations.

Not with him.

She never has.

She’s always known exactly what he was. She loved him for it. Loves. She knows the disease that seeps underneath his veins, dragging his eyes from her and a future to the immediate satisfaction of snapping bones. She knows that he has tasted blood the way that she tastes water. That he has drunk from the fountain of life and been unquenched, always hungering and thirsting for a destruction beyond her scope of understanding. She knows that he is the reaper and one day he will come for her.

She knows.

She knows.

So she doesn’t flinch when the sky above them begins to to grow dark, the clouds snapping with his own anger—bare in its simplicity, raw in its primal nature. She tilts her head up slightly to consider the way that the wind whips around them. She feels the negation within her stirring and she inhales it deep, taking it into her belly and trapping it for a moment. Let him have this. Let him have this moment.

The mud crawls up her muddy colored legs and she welcomes it. Her blood begins to simmer, and she allows it. Once, when she was a star-eyed girl, she would have been frightened by this. But not now. She is not the same girl she was when they had first met and although her hips still slope awkwardly and her proportions still don’t quite line up she is stronger, more certain, more confident in it.

At his question, she just looks at him, calm in spite of the way he presses the knife to her throat, the way that it nicks the flesh, the blood that wells. Is this love? he asks and she just smiles, the expression almost dreamy. She inhales at the feel of his teeth against her, the ash he leaves behind, the slight burning of hair and flesh. “It could be,” she answers breathlessly. “For us it could be.”

Is this what you’ve always wanted?

She laughs, silver bells in the middle of the summer storm.

“I told you - you’re all I’ve ever wanted.”

But then the power in her ripples and she laughs again, the sound taking on more of an edge.

“Enough.” The word is powerful in its own right and she releases her gift, letting it balloon within her, reaching out to smother the fire in him. Her eyes are brighter than they’ve ever been when she looks at him but she doesn’t say anything else, just lets the fires smolder in their wake.