Private in your eyes, i see something to believe in; brinly

ILLUM

He never left the dark.

Even when, one morning, the sun remembered what it meant to shine and new light fell over a world scorched by evernight, it never reached him. It was more than being hidden by the shadows beneath the giant taiga forest, more than the dark his family had inherited over generations from his father. It didn’t stay because he had asked it to, not even because he had demanded that it do so. It stayed, though he did not understand why, because it was him. Some vital piece that had evolved or devolved in the everdark, something that had grown and changed inside him.

All these many months later - so many that it could be entire years for how well he kept track of time - he still did not know if the change that had happened inside him was the product of festering dark, of the wickedness that had been created inside him, or if it was an evolution spurred by the light of love too fleeting to hold onto. Had he fallen deeper, or had she given him something else to carve the dark inside his chest.

It seemed a fools curiosity, and yet his dark before had been entire. It had been the absence of light, the absence of anything good.
This was something different. This dark had starlight and stardust, had moonlight and milky ways. It was incomplete in a way that made him wonder if her light had reached through some crack in his chest to infect the wickedness inside him.

To heal it.
But he could not be healed, and he knew this.

His eyes are almost entirely gold now, that ring of silver just a thin band of light around his pupil as his gaze wanders through the forest. He is looking for nothing, looking because his mind is a maze of thoughts that get harder and harder to navigate every day, every second. A maze that always finds him at dead ends that leave him simmering in a fury that rises so easily inside him these days. It is the feeling of being purposeless, of being more when he is still nothing. Of being lost.

There has never been any place he belonged, though he had chosen to haunt the same forests his family had picked as home. His place, but never somewhere he belonged. But he had always known who he was, even in his twisted wretchedness he had no doubt of what it was that existed inside him. The temper and the fury, the way he liked to corrupt in the very same way he had been corrupted. To take things that were never meant for him, things better than he could ever be. But even those urges are quieter now, drifting through the galaxies that swirl around him and trace starry patterns over skin just a shade too indigo to be the black of empty shadow.

This change is an unraveling inside his chest, a new fear that makes him burn cold and still with the fury of smoldering stars - and when he finds those eyes burning brighter than they have any right to, hard and brown and beautiful, it ignites this new dark inside him. It is like finding a mirror, like finding himself. He can go nowhere else but to her, though he chooses to do it in a lazy way to conceal the way he wants to know the exact shade of her smoldering gaze, to know what lies deeper.

He moves between the shadows, teleporting between steps until he is close enough that the night is something that spills from him to wash over her skin, to claim her within the limits of the starry dark that follows him always. But he is deliberate in its creation this time, deliberate in the dark that makes her all but disappear, in the stars that drift around him and expand to fill this place in the forest. He draws closer, and there is a moment where it seems like he might touch her, might try to see if he can build more of that fire inside her eyes. He reaches for her, and his eyes flare with the silver until the gold is almost entirely vanished beneath it.

And then they are both elsewhere in a place where the forest is even deeper, the shadows thick even before the swell of his night reaches them. He doesn't try to touch her, doesn't do anything but drift away a few curious steps to take in their new surroundings before turning to her once again. "I didn't feel like sharing." He says, as if that is any kind of an explanation at all. He is something hazy and indistinct in this place, and clouds of stardust solidify beneath the lowest branches of the trees above them, bright because the sun does not reach here. "I'm sure we didn't go far." He tells her, because he is a liar and this fury is still ice burning inside his chest. "Wherever this is."

But the air here is notably cooler, and the way the sun barely reaches them tells him this place must lie somewhere near the heart of the forest. Will she be afraid? He drifts closer again, studying her molten expression and the heat in her eyes that something very wretched inside him longs to feel the ire of. There is something of a smile on his face, something subtle in the gleam of his eyes and the unevenness of his dark mouth when he says, "My name is Illum." As though he cannot feel the chill creeping into his bones, as though he is immune to the sensation of being watched from the dark. "Seems like a nice place for a walk, no?"