"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
what have I done, with my heart on the floor,
I must be out of my mind to come back begging for more --
She doesn’t sleep.
Instead, she stares into the dark of Hyaline and thinks how Beyza told her that the reason for Este’s seemingly incurable weakness was because the sun was gone, and she can’t help but feel that this is some version of punishment. She has loved the dark for as long as she can remember; not the kind of dark being eyeless left you in, but the kind that made homes inside of hearts that light never breached.
A dark god and a twisted angel creating a daughter that would eventually die in the darkness—maybe it’s a sign, but she’s never been the kind to heed warnings. She only wishes that the punishment landed on her and not her daughter.
The night itself seems to breathe, and she swears she can feel the way the chest of some unseen beast rattles with its exhale. Shadows twist and crawl, and she no longer uses her infrared vision to see what they are. Some are indiscernible, neither hot nor cold, while others are things she would rather not see, wishes them banished from her memory. The unease that this causes is what stirs the memories of Selaphiel trembling alongside Mazikeen’s broken and bleeding body, the girl dying from the wounds inflicted by the things the eclipse had unleashed.
He is still not the same, and it breaks her.
She stares at him where he sleeps on the ground at her feet, next to his twin sister that is now so weak that sometimes Ryatah isn’t sure if she still breathes at all. He sleeps but she can see that it is a haunted kind of sleep, the kind that is restless and primed for nightmares.
She doesn’t sleep, and instead, she watches the way the dark slowly destroys them.
When she first hears the voice—that thin, faint cry of distress—she almost thinks she had imagined it. Lifting her head from where she rested against Atrox she stares into the endless shadows, casting the world into the various shades of infrared and still finding nothing. Nothing but shadow and dark, and the creatures that she has convinced herself that if she does not acknowledge them then they do not exist.
But her heart will not settle, because there is something about the voice that echoes in her mind, in her bones. She does not know the voice and yet it feels as though it is calling to her.
So she follows it, and if Atrox says anything at all when she leaves she does not hear him, but she trusts that he will not follow. The children will need him if something decides to lurk too close, and he knows by now nothing stops her from making poor choices.
Like setting off into the dark alone, as if the teeth of the shadows are not clicking at her heels as she walks away.
It soon becomes clear that she is being led to the mountain, and only then do her steps begin to slow while simultaneously her pulse quickens beneath her skin. Carnage did not usually lay traps for her—if he wanted her, he simply took her—but it was impossible to forget that the last time she was here he had slit her throat.
She wavers for a moment, uncertain and torn by the idea that following the voices to the mountain would anger him again.
She never forgot the way her blood tasted on her tongue every time he spilled it, but it never seemed to be quite enough to keep her from making the same mistakes over and over.
When she arrives at the base of the mountain there are others gathered already, and she is reminded of that day on the beach; the one where she had begun as a mortal and returned as the undeserved angel she is now. Her pale wings pull closer to her sides, and she is suddenly all too aware that she is brighter than most in the dimness the eclipse cast over them. Her golden halo still glowed above her head, illuminating those almost black eyes that are currently doing their best to not look too closely at the faces here.
It is not until she hears him speak—a voice that she would know anywhere—that she looks up. Her heart leaps into her throat at the sight of Firion, and then it breaks when it reaches her tongue. “Firion,” she whispers his name, and already she is at his side, pale lips on his cheek despite the flesh that peels from it. She forgets that she was called here by someone else, and instead lets herself be consumed by the grief at seeing her son in this state. “Why didn’t you come home?” Her voice cracks with all the fractured pieces, wondering where she had gone wrong for him to think that he had to endure this alone.
Sela is broken and Este is dying and Firion is hardly even a shell of what he used to be.
When she manages to tear her eyes from him to look at the mountain she can only hope that the answer they all needed was here.
She honestly hadn’t expected it to stay dark this long.
To some degree, she was accustomed to living in the dark. The bioluminescent markings evident enough of that (evolution is like, totally rad), but even still she’d be lying by saying any part of this whole situation had been simple.
There were her own personal vanity-driven reasons for missing the sun like the lack of her favorite pastimes like sunbathing on the shores of her Hyaline’s lake. But it was the bigger implications that had her worried. Like the fact that the environment needed the sun and all that. Everyone knew but no one said anything about it.
Oh and then there were the monsters. And that was probably the part that freaked her out the most. She hadn’t slept soundly since Mazikeen had told her that the monsters had come as the world’s worst freaking side effect of the eclipse. Darkness was one thing to worry about, but they also had literal actual monsters prowling around. Which was...awesome.
She’d been on guard from the very moment Maze had told her of the threat. Her direct exposure to the creatures had been blessedly limited, though she felt guilty even admitting that to herself. She’d spent most of the early days of the eclipse confined to the lake in Hyaline. And she’d be totally lying to herself (and everyone else) if she didn’t admit that her seclusion was born out of her fear. Part of her wanted to dive to the bottom of the lake and simply wait out the whole situation, but the kelpie within her knew that wasn’t a possibility.
She was scared, but she wasn’t a coward.
So the one time she had encountered one of the creatures, she’d done what instinct had driven her to do. She clamped her jaws around the monster’s throat and dragged it beneath the surface of the lake – determined to end its life before it could hurt anyone in Hyaline. However, try as she might, the damn thing refused to drown. It continued to thrash and slash until she’d had absolutely no other choice but to let it go. It was her life or the monster's - and she'd chosen her own. It had moved so quickly she’d been unable to track it after it escaped her jaws. And the whole incident did absolutely nothing to curb her insecurities regarding the whole situation. She was having a hard enough time grappling with the fact of whether she was even equipped to help protect Hyaline in the first place.
Her whole existence had basically boiled down to a series of existential crises followed by, you know, actual crises. So that was fun. But it still wasn’t enough to get her to throw in the towel. Because as much as she wanted to, she wasn’t one to run from her problems. Even if her problems were…unending darkness and otherworldly monsters.
All these thoughts lingered in her mind as she allowed herself to drift on the gentle current of the lake, so soon to be pulled under by the equally gentle current of sleep. Until she heard something. It was soft and weak but undeniably there and that is enough to rouse her from sleep almost immediately. For a moment, is wary. She has her suspicions about who calls to her. She thinks, for a moment, of Maze and the task that she has been given by the faeries. She knows that to be called does not come without cost, but the hesitation lasts only a heartbeat before she is following the voice into the river that flows out into the common lands – the same river that curls along the base of the mountain. She uses her wings to speed the trip – flying through the water as if sensing the urgency in the plea.
She pulls herself from the river at its closest point to the mountain, shifting into her equine form. The water drips quietly off her scaled skin and she glows softly in the darkness. It’s a small comfort to have, all things considered, though she doesn't glow quite as brightly on land as she does in the water. She pulls her fin-like wings closer to her sides as she walks. Being on land is totally not her thing, but she knows in her very soul that being here is important. She can see that others have already gathered but doesn’t find any familiar faces in those who have come. And Sabal, never one to be content with silence, immediately opens her mouth.
“So, ummmm. I’m assuming that you all heard the voices too?” And immediately after speaking hopes that they did, in fact, hear something and she isn’t the resident crazy person hearing voices in her sleep.
All it had taken was a simple projection - a thought, so broad and careless as it had been whisked across the forefront of his mind - and the young stallion simply had melted into the darkness without even so much as a breath of hesitation.
He doesn’t know how long the darkness has consumed him. Months, maybe? There are fractiles of her at the edges of his consciousness, golden and bright and burning, but they are merely glimpses and nothing more. He roves the foundations of the earth with the beasts that have come from another world, mimicking them in all sense of their likeness and wickedness. He has cloaked himself (and thankfully so, for what would happen to him if they were to know he did not truly belong?) in their skin, sometimes shadow and sometimes solid. He has torn flesh from bone as they had, thrown strangers into the depths of the groaning earth, swallowed bones. He is amongst them as if he had always been there, hidden in his ability to mimic them.
It was marvelous, freeing; delectable. Time was no longer a constraint nor a concern as he became more and more like the creatures who now roam Beqanna freely, and often times he would lie awake and try to remember who he truly was (for he is not these beasts, not at all) and a smile would find his terrible face when he realized he couldn’t.
But then she would then burn against the backs of his eyes furiously and a hiss would slither through dark lips. His camouflage would tatter and flicker, threatening to expose him. It was a simpering reminder of his true form, bright and bold and undeniable.
It was all the more so when a weary, tired voice warbles into his subconsciousness and for a moment, he wonders if it is Aela.
Skandar (but he is not really himself, remember) snorts, lifting his shadowy head in curiosity. The Aela he knows would never cry to him in such a manner. The sound strikes him again, forlorn and with the tiniest brush of magic. The creatures he has roamed with in the last few weeks - the monsters themselves - begin to writhe in response, so he does as well. But even the simplest tendril of magic that reaches out from the tiny voice begins to cause his own disguise to falter, bringing attention to the once shadowy figure that now has rippling skin amidst the darkness.
Anger thrums within him, pulsing and rabid as the eyes of the would-be monster flash a deep scarlet. He would not be discovered, not this way, and before he could be found out by the nearby creeping shadows, he follows the sound of the voice.
When he arrives at the mountain, he is no longer wearing the mask of the monsters he had accustomed himself to beneath the morbid light of the eclipse. He is merely the darkness that hangs terribly thick across the mountain’s base, hidden as his body-less form watches the collection of horses grow before him.
Something groans in him - and perhaps it is only something he can feel - but the shadows that once stray across the ground collect and grow against his will, creating his equine form in a shattering, jagged effect. Whatever magic that had brought him here now pulls back the curtain and reveals his true self to those who care to look - a violet and orange stallion, strewn with galaxies across his body and those pulsing scarlet eyes that threaten to burn anyone who dares to throw their eyes in his direction.
Skandar’s lips unfurl, revealing fangs that he had grown accustomed to when parading with the monsters, ensuring that those around him would keep their distance.
He will not help and he is only here to be sure that no one will succeed but him - even if that meant no end to the darkness that plagues them all.
She had known she was a doorway. She had known, lying on the beach, boneless and dying, with the feeling of tiny hands pressing against her skin, her ribs, her throat. She had known, tucked against her brother’s side, that new magic confusing the pathways of his mind, twisting them to her will while her skin pulsed with the pressure of their fingers, and their claws scraped against the backs of her eyes. She had known it was only a matter of time until they ripped her apart like over-ripe fruit and poured out. Her claws flex, remembering the feeling of splitting open salmon bellies, remembering the way the bright orange roe burst out, sputtering thousands of half-lives across the ground. She remembers lapping them up, little explosions of salt that filled her mouth with the sea, and she remembers the feeling of her own flesh beneath her own claws, and the way the beasts – not one, but many; small bodies sputtering from her split skin – fell to earth drenched in the salt of her blood and the lathered sweat that fell like sea-foam from her torn, panting sides. She remembers how it all seemed like the same thing, and how she had laughed.
They are strange things, their limbs too long, their fingers hungry. Malevolence made flesh, but no more immortal than she, and Manikin remembers the way they had once died, screeching, and hooks one under an eager paw, expertly decapitating the squalling beast while its knife-toothed compatriots scatter into the shadowed grass around them to seek out other prey. Her horrible children.
Manikin was not the only channel. They had all been vessels, every one of them that died on the bone-strewn Beach and went forth into the grinning crack in the universe at the bidding of Grandfather. They had all come back, some with one, others with many, and now each of them is alone in the darkness; abandoned, bereft. The young chimera worries no more now about the Monsters she has unleashed onto a world that should have been expecting them than she did that first day in the Otherworld. They are Prey, she is Prey, the world is Prey. Her beak is stained with the oil slick of their blood, their foul flesh burning and boiling in her belly.
As it turns out, she’s lonely without them inside her.
The call to help finds her downy ears as she is wiping her beak clean in the moon-dried grass, and Manny pauses, nose to the ground and yellow eyes flicking up. Help. And who is she to ignore a haunting call leaking down the mountain like snow melt in Spring? Such a thing made her steal away from a spot not far from where she lounges now to usher in this endless night. Such a call gave her family and power, and it sets her to the high-pitched purring that Avocet hates so much – when he remembers to hate it. When he remembers how it comes before the Hunts.
He rarely remembers, these days. The delicious confusion that crumples his wide brow is addicting, she craves it, even with the buzzing of fae voices crying in the night, taunting the Huntress. She rises with a long stretch and picks her way excitedly to the Mountain’s base, to the milling group, the families that find each other in the darkness, the Helpers and the Hunters. They are lost, mournful, angry, and she grins her feral, beaked grin, yellow eyes fever-bright, and chest still vibrating with that mad, treble, purr, reaching out to each of them with a feeling like peace, like safety.
It feels (at first) no different than the previous one; when the fog in Taiga had shifted into some kind of veil, lifting to reveal a glimmer of a past Desert kingdom. The prickling sensation that creeps along her spine is almost familiar, now.
But the Magic goes deeper than her chestnut skin and she can feel it pouring the quiet places in her mind, filling the spaces of memories (a willow tree that protected them against summer storms, the bubbling laughter of a brook as it races along, the scent of too many flowers alongside a riverbed that held too much laughter). These are memories of brighter, happier times. In a world gone dark, this is how Lilliana retains what little she has left of her glow.
(The chestnut mare keeps them close and even as the night drags eternally on, they are the kindling that keeps her burning. Taiga, her children, and their descendants, all become part of the flame that keeps her moving forward.)
Lilliana pushes it away. She tries to let it get lost in the tangles of her wild mane. She pins her ears in an attempt to ignore it. She stomps a slim foreleg. If she doesn't hear it, it isn't real. But the cry from the Mountain pushes back and goes to the edges of a mind where logic yields to the fantastic. It lingers there, long enough that she can feel the weariness behind the tired voice. It's a feeling she knows all too well. And while some part of her longs to beg their forgiveness, to ask them to choose another, the flame-marked woman knows she will go. There is something faint, something so weak behind the fragments of Magic in the air, she knows she will go. What she hears coming from the heart of the Beqanna is a plea; a cry for help.
Magic always has a price, she reminds herself.
They had been fortunate in Taiga. There had been enough forage provided by Borderline and Memorie to sustain the Northerners. The chestnut cautioned her family against venturing outside their protected home (but that has been her way for some time, where else would Lilliana go besides Tephra?). There was safety in numbers and together, they stood a chance of surviving the nefarious attacks of shadows and teeth. (There had even been rumors of horses disappearing altogether. Had that happened to Neverwhere? Would that explain why the former Khaleesi had vanished so suddenly?) One monster had nearly claimed a granddaughter and hadn't the beast been thwarted, thanks to those who surrounded her?
The more miles she puts between herself and Taiga show dire the situation has become. Even though winter's chill has remained, what she sees as she travels through the Common Lands is nothing like when the land sleeps. It isn't a stillness that comes from resting; this is a predatory one. This Eternal Night is filled with too-many yellow eyes, with too much swallowing silence. The birds have long flown away. What prey that might have occupied the hunters has moved on and Death grips the land, evident from the stench that wafts on the wind and the decay that rots from the bloated bodies to the mildewing leaves above her.
Warden had prophesized this, had seen it and yet to experience it, to walk among so much loss, nearly numbs her.
There is only one relief on this journey: the monster she leaves behind.
It hasn't been in Taiga for weeks but there had been one that lurked and skittered between the Sequoias, different than the rest. Her eldest child bears a scar (not unlike his grandfather) that runs from the front of his chest and reaches almost his left-wing from where it had torn him apart. It had grounded the young pegasus but he would have stayed anyway, he'd said. Until it was gone. Until someone had purged it from the Northern Forest or had trampled it back to the Hell it must have come from. ('Mama,' Roselin had said, 'Do you hear it?' It had intercepted her memories, had somehow gleaned them from her mind and the creature had tried to mimic them. 'Lass!' it called out one night with a borrowed brogue, 'Where are ye'?' Another night, she caught the golden shape of her father. 'Lilliana,' false-Valerio called out in a too shrill voice, 'come home. You can come home, love.' When Rosey had been nearby, it had imitated Elena. 'Help me, Lilli.' she said before Lilliana had enough time to recede the memory of their Hyaline nights. 'I got lost. I got lost.')
The monster never drew them out. But after the third night (day? how many hours passed?), Lilliana had started to wonder if it felt the despair that flooded the air. If it felt her pain. If it delighted in it.
(There is so much she doesn't know about these creatures. But it had - thankfully - gone.)
When she finally reaches the base of the Mountain, she is not alone. Some of the silhouettes are hazy but some she knows. Her heart skips when she sees her youngest son here. "Reave," she murmurs worriedly. Ama and Cheri and Memorie are here (Lilliana rarely follows her own advice, but why hadn't they listened? There will be a cost for this, she is certain. Are they prepared to pay it? Is she?). Her heart twists again but settles at the sight of Leilan and Wishbone when she glances their way.
The only thing left to do is to look up and wait, to listen for the Mountain to cry out again.
Remember when our songs were just like prayers
Like gospel hymns that you caught in the air?
She is on the edge of sleep when the call finds her and builds a home inside her head. The plea is so faint, so weary, and it wakes an ache inside her chest that makes it hard to breathe past. She remembers the story her mother had told when Flower was just a girl, of a time when plague had darkened Beqanna from shore to shore and there was only death to look forward to. The fairies had asked for help then too, and Wonder had answered the call with every bit of heart and hope she had left.
And it had worked, the world had healed.
It is why Flower rises slowly, disentangling herself from the large red deer resting beside her. He rises with her, but with a gentle shake of her head and a glance sideways to where Warden rests in the dark nearby, she tells him, stay here, please. The stag looks offended, close to refusal, but he must see in her golden eyes the pain she feels in her heart, and he doesn’t argue. It is one thing to make this choice for herself, but she will not make it for him, too. She cannot trust that his compulsion to follow her is anything more than just that, a compulsion.
She finds her parents next, together as always because Wonder cannot stand to be apart from Nightlock for long, and she knows that Wonder had not heard the call because she is still curled around Leandre and beside the slumbering skeleton Flower knows to be her father. So many of them are like this now, reduced to bare bones whether they want to be or not - though none seem quite as hurt by it as Nightlock does. She is glad for a chance to go, glad for a chance to help heal what’s been broken. Glad that this time it was not her mother who heard the call. It hurts to watch the ways Nightlock fractures with each passing day that never knows the sun, but it would be nothing like the unraveling that would happen if Wonder never came home.
Flower leaves them - leaves Birch and Warden, leaves her parents and her siblings, and the choice not to say goodbye is an easy one. They would never let her leave, she is glass and fragile, made to be broken by almost everything around her. To her this call is little more than a death knell, but that is what makes her the perfect choice. She is already impermanent, already doomed just by existing, and the fact that she has known this her whole life makes it easier to face whatever comes for the sake of those she loves. She is a better choice than Wonder who has a family and is so needed. Better than Nightlock for the same reason. Even her siblings have futures to look forward to, lives to find and hold fast to, families to build. None of them are like her.
She is full of cracks and fissures, and broken chips cover her glass body like unrecognizable constellations no one would ever want to know. Only Warden had ever tried, and though it hurts most to leave him without saying goodbye, she reminds herself he’s always known he wouldn’t have forever with her. It is better for it to happen now before he has a chance to finish falling, better before they find themselves wanting a family.
She does not realize that there is already life growing inside her, impossibly.
The journey to the mountain is long and lonely, longer than it needs to be but she is careful to avoid the beasts that roam like squabbling dragons over newfound treasure. It is the only way she has survived any of this so far, being quiet and careful, being invisible. Maybe it helps that she is glass and not flesh, that she lives but only just barely. Maybe the creatures don’t find her worth their time, and she can hardly blame them. But she has never come face to face with one. Tephra had been somewhat spared from the deep black that settled over the other places, what with the gullies full of magma burning hot and bright like veins across the warm rock. They made pockets of warmth and pale orange light, and she and Warden had picked a home near one.
She is relieved when the mountain looms suddenly before her, sound disappearing behind peaks she cannot see in a world so dark. There are others here, and for an instant she feels impossibly small and unimportant, wishing she had let Birch come with her to chase away the lonely fear that wraps around her rubied skin just as the shadows do. But it is better that he stayed, better that he is safe inside Tephra where lanterns and lava breathe moments of light into the perpetual, starless dark. I’m here. She thinks, looking around at the faces nearest her, all unrecognizable, and then up the mountain. Fear prickles inside her, making her chest feel tight, but there is some amount of faith inside her too, and the same willingness her own mother had felt despite the weight of knowing the fate of a broken world rested on her shoulders. I don’t know what you think I can do to help, but I promise I’ll try.
Volos has known the dark nearly as long as he has the light.
It envelopes him now, the dark, fitting snugly over his sagging shoulders weighted by weariness. Night hangs over the island he calls home, though it is impossible to know it. There is no sun to push its way up and above the horizon of the sea in the morning, spilling its delicate pink and orange rays of light across the waves. There is no moon to come along and guide them gently into their evening settling, no stars to show them the way. But sleep finds them still, at times. It is something that brings some sense of normalcy when it comes, some sort of routine they can abide.
Tonight, however, is anything but normal.
The echo of a faint voice rings in his ears and startles him awake. These days his sleep is always light and easily broken with a multitude of monsters in their midst. As he listens to the unseen speaker, his gold eyes instantly go to Titanya dozing nearby. He watches for any sign that she’s heard the voice herself, any twitch of a muscle or raising of her head in acknowledgement. The voice sends a call for help, a cry to action. It should probably be you, he tells his mother silently, though his mind is already made up. He cannot ignore the piteous plea even if it is perhaps misdirected. Without further thought, he disappears into the thick jungle undergrowth as silent as a specter.
The ocean is a constant, too. It laps at his feet now as he readies himself for what would otherwise be a largely safe passage across. Now, children are expressly forbidden to cross. Volos frowns when he remembers this rule his Granddame implemented; he remembers, too, how he had broken it and nearly paid the price for his insolence.
It had seemed like a game at first. The shadowy tentacles had reached out from the black ocean and waved at him where he stood just beyond the water’s reach. He thought nothing of the chirping, grinding sound the creature made when he took that first step into the sea. He kept going, pulling his legs up when he felt the animal make contact and begin to wrap its legs around his own. Still, he thought it was mere play. It was only when the sand began to fall away under him, when he felt himself impossibly slipping down and saw the water rising to meet him, that he thought something might be wrong. Volos shifted with little life left in him and ripped the monster apart with his teeth and claws, but not before the water closed around him like a coffin. Not before he felt the last of his oxygen slip out of him as bubbles between his lips.
The chirping of the monster rings in his ears alongside the distant voice as he plunges into the inky ocean. To acknowledge fear is to give it power, he knows, so he thinks instead of his family as he powers across the channel to the mainland. Instead of the unformed shadows likely racing underneath his buoyed body, he pictures the faces of his parents, his siblings. Instead of thinking about the trouble he might be getting into (with whatever lies ahead and what waits for him back home when Titanya and Halcyon see him again), he imagines how the light will once again refract off the surface of the grotto and make rainbows in the air. He can’t wait to show his newest siblings their home in all its’ renewed splendor under the sun. All he has to do is bring back the light for all of them. All he has to be is brave enough to face the darkness alone.
He already feels the weight of all that is to come on his shoulders that are young but already broad and sturdy. As Volos pulls himself out of the ocean, he feels a creeping sensation along his spine as if he is lucky to have escaped the waves. As if, had he lingered a second longer with the water pulsing against his sides, he might not have had to worry for what was awaiting him at all.
There are more shadows here, of course, more monsters to concern himself with ahead rather than behind. He is not wholly unprepared. Living in the darkness for so long has made him adaptable. Here and there along the way, Volos breathes small jets of fire to light the path as much as he can. The fire usually doesn’t work the way he wants it to. Sometimes the line of flames is crooked, sometimes it lights the ground on fire instead (and he hurriedly stamps it out with his hooves). But like in Ischia, it gives him some light to see by for a bit of time.
All they need is a little light to spark the rest.
The voices draw him towards the towering Mountain that should cast a great shadow. Like everything else, the darkness takes away even the magnificence of the rising slopes. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t here to be impressed or wooed by a show of power. Indeed, based on the quality of the fairy tones, he doubts there would be any to be shown. There are many others called to the base of the Mountain it seems. His eyes strain to catch their vague shapes. Some are dimly lit, glowing even. He is too worried to use his fire in case it does not behave as it should. He will not risk the others so that they may see his face, but he greets a few nearby. The others skirt the edges.
He is not always sure if they are friend or foe, helper or monster.
Which had come first?
The call or the stunning realization that she was gone?
He had lunged into the darkness after her. For so long he had remained as still as he could, afraid to disturb the crown of thorns that sat low on his brow, but he hurled himself into the shadows with reckless abandon. He gnashed his teeth and called her name until he was hoarse, until there was no voice left and then he had dredged her name up out of the darkest parts of him and flung that out into the pitch-black night, too.
And he had wept, too. Wept with new urgency. Wept until his whole face was slick with gold.
How quickly it had happened! He had pulled her against him, hooked his neck over hers and held her close. As if he had ever been capable of keeping her safe! As if he had ever been good for anything! And then she was gone and he had stumbled blindly after her to no avail. A worthless, lovesick fool.
He had understood the inherent dangers of monsters inhabiting their home, certainly, but he had thought them invincible. Why? Because he had thought, too, that their grandson might have been responsible for them which meant that somehow they should impervious to all of the dark things. They had never met the Alliance champion, their grandson, certainly Kensley would have kept him from them even if they’d tried. But Jarris had heard the rumors, rumors of how the eclipse had edged its way across the surface of the sun as their grandson had gone to battle with Gale and the monsters had come soon after.
Now Plumeria is gone and he is alone. Alone with nothing but the sound of his beating heart. Why should it go on beating when the darkness has taken her from him?
But it is in this silence that he hears the call.
Had it been there all along? Had he been deaf to it because he could hear nothing beyond his desperate pleas for his lover to be returned to him? How he aches to have her anchored against his side again.
His nostrils flare as he turns his gaze (blurry still with the relentless gold tears) in the direction of the Mountain. (He cannot see it of course, not in this impenetrable darkness, but he knows where it is. He has so many memories of it and not one of them is good.) He does not want to go. Oh, how desperately he does not want to go. Especially with the way that his heartsickness has been compounded in Plumeria’s absence. But he knows, too, that the Mountain may be his only chance at getting her back.
So he goes. And the thorns bite greedily into the soft flesh of his brow as he walks so that deep red blood mixes with the vibrant gold of his tears as he goes, scalding his cheeks. Such a vicious cycle, the pain of it all. But there is nothing left for him to lose. Nothing at all.
He arrives at the base of the Mountain, somehow untouched by the things that lurk in the darkness. As if they know that he is nothing but a hollowed shell of a thing, worthless. They have already taken the best part of him.
If anyone casts a glance in his direction he doesn’t notice. And even if he did, he does not have a voice left to greet them with. So he stands and he waits and he weeps.
But he is not here to find the light, he is here to find Plumeria.
I WAS READY TO DIE FOR YA, BABY
DOESN’T MEAN I’M READY TO STAY
Remember when our songs were just like prayers
