"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
Spark does not know how he came to be in her homeland, but she had glimpsed him at the diplomats’ meeting not long ago.
Not long ago, she had called upon her fire mimicry and shed her medicine hat skin for him to don the one of flame and she had never done that for anyone but herself or her twin brother. She had seen the doubt in his eye, the unwillingness to mention further his curse, and then… the question of what he had done to her and her confusion had been too much to bear. Spark had left him then, not knowing that he had not meant what had Giver done to her but someone else, someone from the stallion’s own terrible tragic past.
She seeks him out now, the slim small medicine hat mare and not that thing of fire incarnate that she had let him glimpse. Spark did not think she could bear another inquiry like that, not now - now that Giver is back and her heart spun itself in dizzying circles of both love and hate, each intoxicating the fire that burned in her veins until she had no thoughts but those of pure conflagration and saw fires burn in the backs of her eyes. She realizes now that he never meant a thing about Giver but someone else, and it is curiosity that picks at her with a dull thumbnail like trying to pick a scab off a wound.
Spark finds him and asks him, “Who did you mean when you asked if he had done that to me?” There is no hello, no friendly meeting of muzzles and shared breaths between them, only her blunt question as she stares at him, bold in her gaze and her little stance like she will not be brushed aside but demands his answer. She thinks he owes her that much, for the way he’d looked at her and moved that much closer to her when she burned hot and bright and meant to keep him away.
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
Their meeting had not been forgotten. The world had been turned upside down, strange lands overlapping the ones he had once known or called home. His curse (not a gift, never a gift) had faded and the confusion had been paramount in his terrible conversation with her that day. Of course she hadn't sucked the power right out of him but one can never be too careful in this place. It was a painful reminder he knew all too well, Beqanna can never be trusted.
The way her flames had danced around her body but didn’t singe, didn’t turn her to ash. It was so painful and yet he had been so enthralled. Then she had disappeared. Since that time in the meadow, he had climbed the Mountain. The bear had been returned. Then he had found Ellyse who had flipped his world around once more. The one eyed stallion was just as confused as that day in the grassy clearing although the circumstances had changed.
She catches him quickly after the meeting and to be honest he had rather hoped she would. Her words catch like a net over his retreating backside and he pauses, ears flicking back. Hesitating. Considering. Turning his head before the rest of his body follows, first the empty socket followed by the gold flecks dotting the sienna of his one iris. There’s a frown tugging at the end of his lips but his gaze is not unkind. The bear shifts within him, wary of her fire. His heart flip flops slightly, unsure of the morbid desire he has for her flames. It’s not the same passion that Ellyse had stirred, that mutual suffering bonded by one man.
”Carnage.” He bluntly replies, searching her gaze with his own for a reaction. ”I figured he bestowed one of his cruel gifts on you too.”
Spark forgot very little in fact, and could not forget the haunted frozen look of him that warred so much with the bold hot look of her, even if she was little and as lost as him (not that she’d admit it, but she has been - still is, if she admits it to herself even though Giver had come back, not necessarily to her but he’s back all the same).
When he turns to look at her, it is with the empty eye socket first that makes her suck in a breath. Not because she is frightened of it, but because she is curious by the three large scars - no, claw marks, and she is curious as to what manner of beast did that to him until the gold-flecked sienna of his good eye meets her own mismatched gaze of black eye left and right eye red. He does not look nearly as unkind and haunted as he first had when they initially met but she can see the frown that tugs at his lips, has she bothered him? Perhaps she had been too bold after the meeting as she sought him out but she makes no apology for it.
She is not prepared for his blunt reply or the name that he drops like a hot spatter of magma at her feet. It seems rife with bitterness and anger, things that she knows all too well of these days. But she can feel her black-bonneted head start to shake in a resolute no before her mouth even gives it shape. “No, I don’t know this Carnage you speak of.” This is a faint thread of pity in her voice because she knows this answer will disappoint him. Does he still care to even know the name of the one that manifested all this hurt in her? A name that still makes her heart lift and soar with pure love and adoration despite how heavy it sits in her until she peels her skin off and dresses in nothing but clean hot flame?
Instead, small bold Spark takes a step forward and lifts her whiskery nose towards his scarred eye socket. She could almost touch the three scars and the emptiness where an eye should be but only her breath blowing out of her nostrils as she breathes is all that he’ll be able to feel. “Did he… did he do this to you?” Her heart flip-flops inside her, like a slippery salmon trying to swim upriver against a rushing current that pushes it back. Spark is both sickened and concerned, alarmed almost, at the compassion that bubbles up in her from a place long thought dead, squashed out like a bright star.
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
Part of him cringes at the familiar quick inhale of breath, he should be use to it by now. His refusal to truly acknowledge what had happened (and therefore keep the bear at a distance) a small rebellion to pretend that maybe he was fine. Not a broken shattered thing. No matter how many times this reaction is stirred by the tattered remains of his socket, it was something you couldn't truly brush off. Just like the living nightmares that he could never forget no matter how hard he has tried.
The Dark God’s name falls from his lips, wrapped in bitterness that he couldn’t hold back even if he tried. Quickly she shakes her head and whatever expectations he might have grasped quickly fall away. No, she had not been one of the ones he had heard screaming in the cave. A shudder finds it’s way across his hide but he barely feels it. Had she chosen her flames? It seems odd to him that someone would want such a power, one that could burn and hurt so many…
There’s no chance to ask, the question forgotten as she steps closer to him. Visibly tensing, only able to see slight movement as she reaches towards him. Her breath hot on the thin dark skin, so empty and hollow. It brings back a memory, the searing white hot pain when the bear had raked it’s claws across his face. The bear inside of him swipes at the bars of it’s enclosure, remember? Remember the day we became one? Accept it…. Accept me.
There is a moment when his heart reopens like a floodgate, the empty void of all the trials he had ever faced threatening to swallow him whole. Tilting his head only slightly enough to see her fully within his view again, the one eye holding only endless loss in it’s depth. ”Yes.” The softest murmur, a far away expression rapidly extending over his facial features. ”I was weak... So he broke me apart and let me die to make me strong.” It is the first time he has ever spoken of what had happened, had opened up anything about that day that he tried so hard to put behind him. With dull realization, he knows that will never happen. Carnage had made him into what he was today, regardless if he liked it or not.
Spark was not disgusted by the empty socket and the scars; she was in awe of it - in awe of him. He was a survivor in a way that she was not, and he survived something that would have crippled most from the inside out but he seemed… not entirely okay but resolute, staunch in his determination to not be belittled by he had suffered - no, endured, she thought. His was a strength that she could never know or taste, a strength that was deep and abiding like the stern rock face of a towering mountain or the deepest peace of a lake you could not see the bottom of.
She suspected his bitterness had something to do with that, but everyone needs a reason to keep on going. Had she not used her own anger and heartbreak to her own advantage and thus, discovered the fire laying dormant inside her? Spark had chosen the fire for the way it burned her clean, so clean, because of her own desperation to stop feeling and remembering the way a pair of lips surrounded by the light of stars of his own making had touched her skin, trailing love and kisses like summer’s rain across the length of her…
He shudders from memories.
She shivers from them.
Neither notices.
She looks up at him, meets his one-eyed gaze and the loss in that eye is enough to break her own heart all over again. No one should feel loss of such an unfathomable depth as that! But he has, as she watches him go far away - far back enough to remember, to feel again, from a distance. He admits that he was weak but she doesn’t think that was why this Carnage broke him. She thinks it was because he had to be broken to realize the strength inside himself. Sometimes, that is the only way, hard as it may be.
Spark keeps to the side that he can see her best from and reaches out to stroke his neck with her soft whiskery muzzle. “I’m sorry,” she admits, though no amount of apologizing from her could right so wrong a wrong as this. “I think he made you stronger though. Made you recognize something in yourself that you didn’t notice before despite how horrible he was to you.” She says it because she believes it is true, as her nose slips up underneath his flaxen mane to breath in the scent of him that smells a little wintry, a little bear-ish (she knows a scent like that, has met a bear before), and pulls back to sneeze, his flaxen hair and winter scent having tickled her nostrils.
“You’ll never forget what he did to you but you’ll be bigger than it."
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
He has never thought himself as strong. He had always been weak, unable to protect himself or the ones he loved. Now he was different, pieces of him broken and put back together, forged with ice. The soul of a polar bear residing within him, merging into every fiber of his being. Peace was evasive, to be thought of as stoic… As the calm in a raging sea, would be surprising. Unheard of.
He hadn’t chosen this path, had not asked to be remade. Had not asked for the trials and the crosses he bore, for the beast inside him. There had never been a choice, it had always been to fight to survive or die. Her soft touch on his neck brings him back, slowly registering how close she was. Looking down at her as he twists his skull slightly, her caress warm against his chestnut flesh. The bear is silent, unsure of her fire. It’s not the same as when he was with Ellyse, this merging of fire and ice sparking in such a different way.
He doesn’t pull away from her, ears swiveling forward as he ponders her statement. ”You may be right…” And she is, he realizes. Carnage had wanted to see the passive stallion feel something else, had wanted to see his rage. ”I doubt that’s what he intended.” The flat bitter words as his heart becomes sore with the memories. He doubted that Carnage had lured and wrangled them all to make them better versions of what they had once been. No, he remembers the screams echoing in the cavern. Carnage had just wanted some fun.
Spark releases whatever hold she has on him as she sneezes and he finds himself smiling at her, not aware of the warmth within his gaze. Around her he feels like he is thawing, defrosted. The bear grumbles with discomfort but is unusually quiet, afraid of her flames. His own muzzle lightly bumps against hers, their breath intermingling. ”But what of you? Your fire…” He trails off, wanting to leave his past behind.
Spark recognizes this strength in him because she sees it in herself despite how much she doesn’t want to. A strength like that means she has changed too, but then she has always known she has since the moment the fire came in through the door left open wide by the sickness that ravaged her and it cleaned her up, built her anew like he’d been built anew by ice and a polar bear’s soul. In some small way, she could relate to him and in other ways, she couldn’t because she had never endured the likes of the things he had had to endure and that made him stronger in her eyes.
He looks down at her, as if he’s surprised that she would even bother to touch him after the things he’s told her. She looks up at him with her mismatched eyes that mark as Offspring’s child though she hasn’t been a child since the days when she came up to his big black knees, but something in the way that the chestnut stallion looks at her now makes her feel small and oddly safe. “No,” she murmurs from where she has tucked herself into his side, something that is so characteristic of Spark to do with those that she trusts. “I’m sure that was not his intention at all but it’s funny how we have a way of changing the intent of things.”
Spark can see that he goes back inside himself to a place that she cannot follow. Wouldn’t even dream of following him into. She gives him time, her nose still tickled by the hairs of his mane after her initial sneeze and that seems to be what snaps him back to her side, smiling and dazzling her with the warmth in his eyes. His muzzle touches her, they share a breath or two as he asks about her fire and she senses his inherent need for distraction from the memories that are still close to the surface to be forgettable. Spark though is wary, deep down. She’s never told anyone - not her father, not her twin brother - how exactly it is she came by her trait.
But she musters up the nerve to do so now because she feels a strange kinship to Ledger and she owes him the truth if nothing else. Maybe the truth needs to be told now instead of staying bottled up inside of her for so long. She wonders if the fire will go out of her though with the telling because the secret of how she came by it is what keeps her igniting into flame all the time, or so she tells herself. Spark doesn’t really know how she can combust and be that pure thing of flame, just that she can and it always came easier on the heels of anger. She looks at him one last time before tucking herself even closer to his side, needing the solidness of his flesh as support for something she has never breathed a word of to anyone.
Where to begin?
It all comes flooding back into her mind and she doesn’t it, but her fur starts to smoke and there are little sizzling noises along the back of her spine.
“I fell in love when I was little. He was older than I was, much older but not so much as to be an issue for us. Like me, he had a sibling - a sister, that he was close to and he understood the bond between my brother and I. He could bring the stars down from the sky and spin them around his skin. It was magic…” here, she trails off, remembering and her voice is a girlish murmur touched with awe as if she can still see it for the first time, that teal glow around his handsome face, the constellations he made and named for her - after her, even.
She recovers, still unaware that she is smoking and sizzling and that she has instinctively put some distance between herself and Ledger now. “We never stayed together much, always drifted apart but somehow, always found one another again as I grew up - as I became a mare. Ours was a sweet love, innocent in the beginning. Until his sister showed up and everything changed. She came back, thinking he’d love her because she had two foals with her - twins, his and hers. Somehow she had tricked him into thinking she was I and he thought we were having a baby together.”
Spark gnashes her lip between her teeth, feeling the hot sweep of fury through her as she remembers the proud triumphant look Alight had worn on her face, her wings afire above the backs of the foals, singing their newborn skins. She blinks, unable to dispel the image burned into the back of her mismatched eyes - one black, the other red, and the red seems to hold a ring of fire in it. Her tail bursts into flame and lashes at her pale flanks. If only she had been this mare of fire back then! But she had been meek and sad, looking between them and looking at the twins that should have been her own but weren’t.
“He believed that the night he’d spent in a mare’s company had been with me but it was her disguised by powerful magic as me. They bickered, he cast her aside, told her what she did was wrong and that he loved me but he loved those children more, and I don’t blame him for that. He took the colt and she dragged the filly back into the sea with her. I never saw them again. Not her or the girl. He came back with his son, still looking for the lost little sister but things aren’t the same. How can they be? But after that night and before he came back, I… I gave up.”
Spark didn’t know how else to explain and for a moment, the fire and the heart goes right out of her. “I wanted to die.” She pinned the chestnut stallion with a stare of hard determination. “When you feel like your heart has been ripped from your chest, what point is there in living still? I didn’t think I’d ever recover. So I stopped drinking water. It tasted like sand. I stopped eating grass. It tasted like sand. Everything was bland and meaningless to me then. So I became sick, too weak to do anything other than lie there with my legs folded beneath me and dream and I kept dreaming of that night, of my anger, and of the volcano at my back.”
Here, her voice takes an almost reverent tone as if it was the volcano of Tephra that saved her. She never knew where the fire came from - it was just there all of a sudden. “I sweated. I dreamed. I knew I was going to die then something happened, I changed. Anger swept through me hot as magma and I felt like I was becoming volcanic, like I was being cleansed of all pain and hate, even the love too, seemed like it burnt up to ash inside me. When my brother found me, nosed my face and my neck, something snapped in me and I shed this flesh for pure flame and freedom.”
She flashes him a dazzling smile, coming closer again now that she has settled her flames down. Her nose finds his shoulder and she rubs the side of her face against it; “I found myself again but it hasn’t been easy. He comes and he goes, and I still love him but I feel like sometimes, it isn’t enough. Our love won’t hold either of us together for very long.” Spark pulls her black-bonneted head back from his side to look him in his good eye, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to talk your ears off.” The expression on her pale face is sheepish. She’s never confided this much in someone. Never expected to. Never planned to. But she feels as if a heavy stony weight has fallen off her back because someone else knows now.
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
It is different to have her tucked into her side. Not with the passionate need like there was with the Head of War. This was different. Despite the heat of her flesh against the coolness of his own skin, he does not recoil. The way she tucks herself into his side, almost like a little sister and yet decisively…Not. It reminds him in a way of Soliel. He hadn’t seen his half sister in years but she had always been overly kind to him once she had discovered him and his morbid life. She had tucked the young colt to her side much like this, giving him the first taste of affection in his hard young life.
There’s something else that lingers in the sensation of her against him, they way his insides threaten to melt in rebellion of her fire. With a pang of guilt he thinks of Ellyse but it’s quickly chased away remembering the looks she and Dahmer had given each other over Smoak’s newborn head. There was nothing to feel ashamed of. He was alone, he had no-one.
Her breath is sweet, fading out the usual assault of ash, soot, and salt that he has come to know of Tephra. Their muzzles rest gently against each other for a few precarious heartbeats, enough to make him wonder what exactly he was doing. She is engaging and despite what she may think, innocent. A far more jaded and pure thing then himself. Suddenly, her story comes spilling out. Hesitant at first but growing with confidence the more she warms to her story. He is flattered that she thinks him that worthy of her trust, quietly listening.
A soft sizzling sound is heard and he visibly winces as her heat becomes too much, the bear becoming angry within. His heart palpates with agony and for a moment he flickers between hooves and claws. She moves away and he slowly relaxes, concentrating once more on her words. Hers is a story of heartbreak, so common and yet every tale could be different. Before he may not be able to comprehend that kind of internal pain but now… With Ellyse feeling so far from him, he gets it. He understands the betrayal, the rise of fury that makes her gnash her teeth and flushes her cheeks.
When she comes close to her conclusion, when he can see something go out in her eyes, he feels deeply for her. There’s still a steely glint to them as she fixes his good eye in her frame. All too aware of his own diminished self, as his hip bones protrude from his emaciated body. Knowing she had felt the poke of his ribcage where it jutted from his side. This is something he also knows too well, giving up. Not having the will to care anymore. Once she has come to her conclusion of how the fire had consumed her, had chosen her in a way, she has left him with much to think about. The feeling of her rubbing against him slowly bringing him back to the present. ”I don’t mind.” He finally states quietly, looking at her with new respect.
”You didn’t have to tell me that… But I’m glad you did. It seems we have more in common then I thought..” A soft laughter that fades as quickly as it came. A pause as the soft sea breeze dances through his tangled flaxen locks, lifting them slightly as they graze against her neck. "You deserve better then that Spark.” No longer looking at her but out into some distant view in the horizon. For the first time, he considers telling his story. He had never shared it with anyone from point A-Z. The girl of glass had gotten some from him (and he wonders where she is, if she’s ok) but not all. Yet she had shared so much of herself, he feels obligated to do the same.
Hesitantly, with her sometimes tucked up beside him, he begins. Not looking at her, not wanting to see her reactions. Pausing now and then when his throat constricts, when it becomes to hard. Telling her of his birth, when Chernobyl had stolen his mother away from him mere seconds after being born. The cruelty of her murder, making him watch. She tells him of living with Librette, Chernobyl’s mother, in the Dale where he had been pawned off on her. Of knowing the identity of his true father, Magnus. Of having to watch Magnus and Libby together but not being able to tell him who he was, in fear of losing his life.
He tells her of not knowing affection until he was much older, when Magnus learned the truth. Of the strained relationship between them, how Magnus had died and then come back. He tells her of wandering different lands but always coming back to Beqanna, back home. He tells her of the Gates, how it had never felt quite right but it was all he ever really had to feel safe. He tells her of Adaline, a girl made of glass. Precarious and fragile, how she had taught him how little looks mattered. That the heart was what made them beautiful. And she had been beautiful, inside and out. Lost to him now, lost before he could ever tell her that.
The hardest part is the time spent in Carnage’s lair. In detail he explains being chased by the hounds to the cavern. Being locked in a cage. Forced into trial after trial. Having to confront Magnus and kill him, Carnage plunging an icicle into his heart. Dying and being brought back to life as an ice wraith. Fighting the polar bear that took his eye, the brand burned into his side. Painfully he recounts having to kill a version of himself, ripping his own heart out and offering it on a silver platter for Carnage to take. Earning him his freedom.
How he had discovered the bear, the shame he felt when Magnus tried to help him, how he had fled.
He grows quiet then, reflecting everything that had led him to this moment in time. Led him here with her beside him. The constant flicker of anger in the back of his throat, the rolling resentment of his father that was slowly eating him alive. To that he is unable to speak aloud. ”I’ve never told anyone that before.” He finally manages with shaky breath, still looking to the distance. To all the nightmares that play before him as real as day.
It never occurred to her that it was anything but natural to tuck herself into his side. She had done this a thousand times and more with Spear but if she was honest with herself, there was something a tad bit different about the closeness they were starting to share with one another from the stories told to how she fits right into his strong scarred side as if she was meant to. Spark’s motives were chaste although she could not admit to a strong sisterly sense to them either. It was… natural. That was the best explanation for it that she could come up with, even if it smacked a little of a lie in her own mind.
Spark feels but the slightest pang of guilt too. Where is Giver in times like this when she thinks that she needs him most? Nowhere to be found, other things beside her on his mind and it leaves her… adrift, and usually she would turn to her fire to drive out all thought of him but instead, she turns her face into the chestnut shoulder and sucks a breath rich with his scent and it steels her, straightens out her spine and restores some semblance of peace to Spark’s world no matter how marginally wrong it was for either of them to think themselves alone when they had lovers out there in the world whose hearts beat for them.
She does not think herself deserving of the newfound respect that shines in his lone eye. Spark ducks her head beneath it in embarrassment and a hoof scuffs at the dirt as he tells her that she didn’t have to him that but he’s glad she did. It brings a smile to her face and makes her lift her head up to look at him again as he mentions how much they have in common. She laughs a little, “Maybe I do but I’m often assured that love is never easy. Perhaps we only get out of it what we put in and maybe I spent too much time being angry with the way he always looked at me thinking I should have been the one growing fat with his child. I just never understood his looks, nor did I ever ask him to explain them. I was naive, still am sometimes.” she admits, but she senses a change in him as if he prepares for something and she remains tucked up close to his side, sometimes.
Sometimes, she takes a step or two away from him as if intrinsically recognizing that her heat is too much for the ice-bear in him to bear. But she listens - that is one thing Spark excels at, listening. She hangs on every pause just before the continuation and is careful to keep her expression neutral and her eyes everywhere else but on his face though her heart constricts time and time again for the things he’s had to endure. Suddenly, her story doesn’t seem all that bad compared to his. She is not glad that his tale is as terrible, but rather, her heart bears a new sorrow for that spindle-legged colt made to watch his mother die and knowing he could never tell his father who he was unless he forfeited his life for the telling. Secrets are terrible things, shameful even and her heart goes out to him, offers itself up for the taking - poor naive Spark, she cared too much that it ate her up.
He becomes quiet but there is no peace in him after the telling - not like there had been for her. His face is distant and it is the distance that holds his eye captive and she feels like there is some restraint there, because he has told her so much and trusted her as he has not trusted another before. She feels a sense of privilege in that, as a friend to him and she takes a step back to lift her head to his back where her teeth begin to chomp in small circles to move the tension out of him. “Oh Ledger,” she sighs between each grasp of his skin in her blunt teeth. What more can she say to that? “We both have that in common, telling our stories when we’ve never told them before.” she says with a little laugh, moving around him until she finds that detestable brand from his time in the beast’s lair and she traces it with her lips, planting a chaste kiss there.
“You didn’t have to tell me all of that either.”
Spark can only smile, her cheek against the branded skin.
Their tales were bringing them closer together, she could not deny the deepening sense of respect and trust she had for him now. Spark knew there was a connection between them but she did not want to poke at it too much. “Ledger…” she murmurs his name but leaves the thought unfinished.
Bound for trouble from the start I've been walking through this old world in the dark
They both craved for normalcy, for the love that seems to forever elude them, the need to be held and cared for. All those things that had never been given easily to them, if at all, from the past. Their hearts throbbed and fluttered for those that they were uncertain for, that held a key that may unlock their greatest happiness or their ultimate ruin. Her face presses lightly to her shoulder and it feels natural to bow his own neck as his muzzle tucks gently over her ears. A calming and reassuring gesture. A kernel of truth embedded in their hearts that they both turn a blind eye to.
She is so raw, so forthcoming with her honesty. There doesn’t seem to be any coy games to play, she is blisteringly real with her thoughts and feelings. ”I don’t think you’re naive.” He gently contradicts, his muzzle bumping against her neck gently as her heat begins to overwhelm the bear again. ”There are some things we are never meant to understand even if we ask the right questions.” He finally answers, thoughtful as he reflects on his own words.
When he finishes his story to her, from beginning to end, he suddenly feels empty. Tired. A heavy dark thing that he has carried in the very core of his being suddenly released into the world. There’s no sense of relief, only an emptiness. A stretching expanding void. He doesn’t realize when she moves, only feeling the teeth that massage at the tension in his back. Slowly he comes back to life, uncoiling tense muscles that he didn’t realize were tight to begin with. There is a strange pang of guilt, her touch bringing back memories of touching Ellyse, but he doesn’t stop. Instead, his sunken self gives into her soothing massage. The one eye closing slightly as a hip cocks to the side.
A shiver of pleasure shudders through his body as her lips trace the length of his body, coming to rest on the burnt brand of his flank. Lashes flutter as her lips press a soft kiss to the blistered flesh and he stiffens once more, but not due to pain or heavy memories. His name is soft as rain falling from her tongue and there is something fluttering deep within him. A craving for her fire, slightly different then before.
She is beautiful, enticing. They are open and raw wounds to each other, each seeking to find a balm that makes the pain stop. He turns slightly, his neck extended as his lips lightly brush against the strong curve of her jaw. Retreating as he realizes, acknowledges, the turbulent storm brewing between them. Ellyse is too heavy, too impactful in his mind for him to continue. He knows that the connection between them is real but his love for the champagne mare contains his heart entirely.
Even if he had every right to do so, it would not be fair to the medicine hat woman before him. Not after everything she had shared. A loaded sigh falls from his lips, looking at Spark with heaviness in his gaze. ”What are two fools like us to do?”
Ledger
@[Spear + Spark] Also I have a feeling we will need to start a new thread after this quest haha
