the open night is my church - Spark

[Giver]

It's in the eyes; I can tell, you will always be danger
We had it tonight, why do we always seek absolution?

‘You’re glowing!’

She had been the first to notice that relic planted in his core by that strange, wily cosmos. 

They had taken, and they had given; when he looked from her face, lightly illuminated, to the curve of his own shoulder—seeing, for the first time, the soft moon-glow around his skin—it made him sad. A pit grew in his stomach, hard and knotted, but he smiled on. ‘So I am…’ his voice, all dazed and hoarse, falling away like the tail of a comet as he considered that lunar mantle. It was a lonely feeling, as if he were a moon chained to earth. 

A moon bereft of stars, halted in a galaxy of grass and wide, open air.
Halted, at least, in her solar system.
That would be comfort enough.

When Exist had scooped up the stars from the sky and brought them back to his skin, Spark had been the first he sought out; he had danced and pressed his nose to her cheek, fading the stars where their flesh made contact, so as not to burn her. He couldn’t have recalled if she had suffered overly so from his prolonged melancholy. He can be oddly oblivious, sometimes—he hoped not; he tried to make it lovely and delightful, all the while feeling some part of him call from distant Plutonian shores. He had been Alight’s court jester for so long; her straining, aching, agonizing disconnection had allowed him to drop some of the armor he wore.

He let Spark see, perhaps, more than he would have liked.

Day by day, he learns to shed more of the things that kept him minimal for so long. He shakes loose those chains, though he does not know it, not truly—(Alight does. She sees it.) He shakes her free, too, though he does this sadly, but deliberately, because day by day she grows stranger and… predative; she grows remote, too, and that’s good, because he sees the way she looks at Spark, those flaming wings crackling in the breeze.

He cannot imagine Spark has not see it.
It angers him and it shames him.
When she finally disappears for good, he shakes it off like a wet, woollen blanket.

(And yet, he wonders. It is better, by far, to know where the danger is.
When he heard word of Killdare’s passing, he had thought, for a moment, to seek her out. Perhaps, foolishly, to spend one moment more with her as they once were.)

He is lighter on his feet than he has been for some time—jovial, really, humming as he walks. Afternoon breaks over the horizon, and so his stars begin to shiver with anticipation and his glow begins to show when shadows fall across his back. Beyond the strait, the world is getting cozy and ripe-coloured. Here, it is always humid and warm—rich with black rock and vivid orchids.

Autumn does not hide in the constancy—it makes itself known, in other ways.

He presses across that familiar, folding landscape, heading towards some sanded beach or another, hoping to find her somewhere along the way.

It's in the eyes; I can tell you will always be danger

@[Kristin] - figured, might as well get them up to speed. And, set it back in autumn, too, so the weird shit can go down and then awkwards ;]