Weed has not desired to return to this land in so long.

He has wandered, far and free from the chains of this place, and he has discovered the kind of freedom and power and bloodshed that he had dreamt of. He returns a changed man, although one who is still so very much the same. He still longs for the kind of destruction that others flee from. He wakes with a hunger and a thirst that will never be quenched, a heart that shudders in delight at the idea of the end.

He had long since imagined this place bled dry of such curiosities—

and yet.

He finds himself back on its shores.

He remains there, for a moment. His shrewd eyes roaming Beqanna as he pulls the plants tighter. They crawl up his slender legs, drape over his shoulders. The vines prick and pierce his skin, but he has never noticed the love bites that they leave. His flesh has long since scarred and puckered beneath the touch.

It is not surprising that he sees her first.

That she is still here at all.

Perhaps, in the end, it is why he has come back at all. There is something like a shadow on the edges of his lips as he makes his way toward her, always so slow and deliberate in his movements, his thin body weaving amongst the others as though they do not exist at all. When he is close enough, he pauses, studying the way she looks the same and yet entirely different. How much has changed indeed.

“Straia,” her name jumps to his lips so quickly it’s as if he had said it yesterday.

“Did my gift to you burn with the rest of the Chamber when it fell?”

for so long have my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary ploy

It feels like stepping into something worn and familiar. Something formed to the shape of him, the threads of it softened by time and use. He is not a sentimental man, but he can appreciate the comfort of it, the way that it feels to have her step near him as she had always done—the scent of her like a remembered dream. And yet. Yet, it is not familiar at all because she is not as she was. She is something new entirely.

And what about her has ever been as boring as habit?

He thrills at the closeness of her, at the rasp of her smoky voice, but his face doesn’t give away such carnal pleasure. Instead it’s just a wisp of a smile on his elegant lips, something that gleams in his impossibly dark eyes. “You are never tied to anything,” he murmurs, reaching over and pressing his lips into the wildness of her mane, breathing her in slowly. “Least of all land.”

Tongue to teeth and then lip as he pulls back, the vines reaching out to her slightly. She could burn them, he realizes suddenly—not knowing how or why. He has no reason to think that she has new gifts to call her own, but there’s something about her that is different. Impossibly more powerful than before.

“But if anyone could restore glory to nothing but a shell…,” his voice trails off as he he ends with a laugh that is more smoke than figure. Teeth graze over her neck as though it had been no time at all since he had last been here. Since they had danced around one another. Since they had passed like ships in the night. Her into the legends of Beqanna and he into the wilderness. She had children by others, he knew, and although he was not a possessive man, he was not evolved enough to not feel the sting of jealousy.

He closes the distance as she steps away, his lips trailing up to her ears where he whispers softly.

“You miss me?”

for so long have my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary ploy

They come together like tendrils of smoke, although he can feel the heat of her flames dancing along the ground beneath them, burning up near their bellies, threatening to reach for their throats. He delights in the violence underneath the whispers of it—the gentleness that gets chewed up by the need and the darkness, the way that they could never be soft with one another for long, could never lean into the sweet.

His eyes darken with something different though as she changes the world around them.

It is not the Valley he had lived in, but he had little loyalty to the place—certainly smaller loyalty than he had ever had to Straia. It was her home though; the place where he had planted that tree for her as some kind of promise that he would return. His chest tightens, just for a moment, as he takes it all in, as this new Beqanna bleeds away, and it is just the two of them in this world, this memory, of her making.

He leans down to skim his mouth over her painted neck. “Good,” he says, as if teasing her with the way that he, too, missed her. Missed the way holding her felt like pressing a knife into the neck. The way she was both life and death in these moments, as the only thing that had ever captured his attention for long.

Weed pulls back though so that he can survey the Chamber of her memory, studying the intricacies of her gift to pull it back into such stark details, every corner of it flourishing with what it had once been.

“You would not remake Beqanna into a mirror of her past,” he finally says, partially in response to the world around them and partially in response to her thoughts before. It is more statement than question.

“What would you remake her into now?”

His smile is sharp and cruel as he looks back to her, studying the elegant lines of her face.

for so long have my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary ploy