"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Change is inevitable. He has always known this. Nevertheless, it always seems to come so unexpectedly. Impressively so.
His home is gone, lost to vast oceans brought forth by even more powerful magic. He had won and he had lost, but none of it is what he had chosen. No, he had wanted simplicity. Sanctuary.
He had wanted life and love and family. And he had had it. Still has it, but somehow it is not the same. It is different. Different and new and strange, like an ill fitting glove he cannot quite wriggle his hand into.
The earth had changed, heaving and splitting, even as a massive hand of pure magic had swept them from their homes, from their very feet. And it had scolded, the owner of that hand, charged them with hubris, stripped them of their talents, of their gifts (and of their curses). And it had tossed them back with a final warning.
Now he stands here amongst the white drifts if the winter meadow, struggling to comprehend the reality of their new world. His first thought, his only coherent thought, in the writhing sea of his mind is her. His love.
”Ilka.” He utters her name like a prayer, unable to do anything else.
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
Sometimes he thinks he has loved her forever (sometimes, when the wind blows just right, and the clouds hang exactly so in the skies, the past, before her, doesn’t exist). Sometimes he believes that this will last forever, that they will not grow old, that their faces will not gray and their bones weary. But then the world reasserts itself. He is reminded that time does not stand still, even for them. He is reminded that everything always changes.
For these reasons (and so many more) he clings to her. His beautiful Ilka, the one constant, steadfast and whole, that he can cling to in such turbulent times. His strength only remains great because of her, because she is there bolstering him.
So when she is not there, when she is thrown from him like wood in a stormy tide, his chest feels hollow and raw. His breath aches inside his lungs, not just from icy cold, but from loss and crushing fear. It is a different kind of fear, different from the one that had clung to him when he had returned to find the deserts washed away by an ocean. It is different because the world is, because there is nothing else familiar to cling to in this infant land.
He has to find her. There is simply no other option. He is not certain if he can live without her anymore.
But somehow, some way, she comes like the miracle she is. He is not certain if it is the way he had sent her name winging in the wind, or if it is simply because they are drawn to each other by some mysterious, magnetic force, but she is there, materializing out of the snow.
He turns to the sound of his name, reaching for her even as she does for him, as she presses into the hollow of his neck and chest. She feels so familiar there, so perfectly right. He wraps her tightly into his embrace, unwilling to let her go. Pressing his dark nose into her mane, warming the ice beaded there until it melts between them, he simply holds her for a moment.
His heart clenches at her words. Had he the power, he would make her world whole again, would give her everything she so richly deserves. But he does not, and it crushes his heart all over again. ”Ilka.” He breathes her name into her neck. ”I know. I’m so sorry.”
But he would always be here for her. That much would never change.
For now though, in this very moment, his first concern is her safety. She is here, tucked securely against him, but they are in the open, exposed. ”We should find some shelter.”
shahrizai
hestoni x scorch
emotional is the best <33 this made my heart happy
