[open] And they lived happily ever after, The End. / Lepis /

[Wolfbane]

Would you help me to carry the stone?

Open your heart, I'm coming home.

Alone together, Wolfbane and Lepis. Them and Loess, exactly how it’d been in the beginning, even if the scenery is a bit different. Wolfbane can remember it now so clearly, all of it. The way her skin felt under his lips, the tone she used when calling out his name. Their firstborn’s cries are ringing fresh in his ears, through the pain and shallow breaths of death approaching.

Where had they gone? Why couldn’t he go back there, to the summer of their love? Had winter set too deeply in his heart, or had the fire of something else burned away his honor? No, he thinks thoughts that are miles away from the present agony of this fresh, blazing hell. No… he’d been cursed, and it’d taken everything from him on the road down.

Eyas watched Bane lying in near-silence and heard her mother’s voice clear as day in her own thoughts, nodding once. She looked up - but by then Ghaul was gone and the smoke was too heavy around them to see much else. The pegasus felt her skin blistering from the open flames spreading out, fanning themselves across the desert scrub and leaving nothing but ash in their wake, and considered what she was offering her mother.

“You have to, not me.” She told Lepis with a sad, broken smile. She’d already given far too much in exchange for what little knowledge she could give. Wolfbane wheezed; Eyas flared her wings and whispered goodbye to him. “Invoke his magic. Call on @[Carnage] if you dare; if his life means that much to you.” Her voice broke. Of course it did. “I can’t…” Was the last thing she said.

Wolfbane returned to the present, where he could hear the sound of his daughter’s wings flapping away. Hell itself was knocking, converging on the two three remaining horses. This gully had no exit save for the one every other horse had used when entering, and by now it was useless to think he could escape or fly away. He lay, sprawled out like a battered and beaten doll, bleeding still from the wounds puckered over his shoulders like raw meat. Lepis could easily break his chest open and end it.

“D… do…” He tried to gasp through the bubbles of blood and grit in his mouth. His eyes were wide and open, staring out into nothing. Bane couldn’t lift his head, he could hardly breathe. “Le- Le-” He tried again.

A sharp gasp shook him alive for another roaring second, and he used it to yell.

“Let me burn!” He cried out, scared not for himself but for Lepis and what her choice would mean. Even though every fibre of his being trembled with the urge to fight, to survive and escape, he was clawing past it toward the truth. The real Wolfbane blinked his dry eyes and tried to gasp for her. “Lep - Lepis.”

He wanted her.
He had always needed her.
It was his dying wish that she comfort him like he remembered, with his head cradled against her beautiful shoulder and her wing covering his face. Let us not forget the bright days of the Pampas, of that world so far away from this one where you shielded my eyes from the sun and kissed my forehead, he wanted to cry.
Where was she? His queen and the joy of his life, his crowning achievement? He could almost feel her there beside him, and even though the rocks pressed into his skin and the heat threatened to extinguish them both, Lepis’ once-lover sighed tenderly. He would like to go now, be done with this and sleep the long sleep. He imagines that their world burns them, engulfs them, but when it passes everything is exactly how it was before and they’re home, with their children gathered around them. He imagines waking up to see her, @[Lepis], and his eyes are glossy and his mouth is open in the shape of her name, but Wolfbane is gone again, far away from Loess and the pain of living.

But it was only fantasy
The wall was too high
As you can see
No matter how he tried
He could not break free

ooc: why am i crying so much right now

[Lepis]

l e p i s

gave me the blues and then purple pink skies

In the end it is just the two of them. Lepis knows their children are nearby; she can see them, now and again, when wind lifts the veil of smoke. Time seems to have slowed, the hoarse whisper of Eyas’ voice in her ears echoes strangely.

If she wants to save him, she must summon the black magic. It is a risk, and she has always preferred sure things.

Her thoughts spin in ten thousand directions, but in the end she finds that it is not a choice she must even struggle to make. The world is burning around them, and she fall to her knees beside him. Her golden wings wrap around them both, and the only thing they feel as their land and bodies burn to ash is the cool blanket of peace.

***

The blue sky overhead glows summer-bright; the smoke cleared away. Ahead of her, Loess shimmers in the heat, red and unburnt. The air smells of orchids and stone and dust after a heavy rain, and Lepis breathes it in deeply. At the corner of her vision, something moves. Lepis knows that shade of blue.

Wolfbane remains – at least to her eyes – the same toothsome pegasus he’d been. Lepis pulls back the wing that she had wrapped around him, but only so that she might tuck it between them and better lean against his shoulder. It takes her a moment to get comfortable (as it always has), and when she finally does, the dun mare sighs contentedly.

“Do you think there’s ever been a Queen of the Afterlife?” She muses aloud. It’s probably too large a goal, but that has never stopped Lepis before. She has eternity to achieve it, after all, and with Wolfbane at her side there is nothing that might stand in her way.



@[Wolfbane]

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