tonight just lay with me | Rapture

[Levi]

The flames along his crest burn low and close to his dark skin, his tail is cropped and neat. There had been little to no rain in the last few weeks, and Levi is overly cautious in this dry weather as he forges a path through the dense overgrowth.

But there is a heaviness in the air now, a stagnant heat, and in the distance the threatening rumble of a tropical storm about to break itself on Tephra's coast.

A wiser man would have found shelter, but the few times in his life he had possessed something close to wisdom, he failed to act on it. And now, after he had caught wind of Rapture's trail, was not the time to abandon his mission.  He had precious little time before the storm erased any evidence of the woman who had filled his thoughts fo the majority of his miserable life.

He had not forgotten her, although it may seem that way to any intelligent observer. In his dreams, he lay with her on the beach, and in the morning he would wake scowling as she dissipated like smoke. He didn't know why his subconscious was always drawn back to that moment, of all the moments they had shared. There had been good ones, and there had been ugly ones, they had raised two children together and he had laughed with her and truly loved her in his own way. And yet many nights he found himself standing above her on that ghostly shore, the endless void of white, her crumpled form, and the deathly stillness as real as the day he found her there.

In front of him, the underbrush thins and he comes to walk alongside a steep embankment. The sound of hooves on gravel echo off the stone as the hill becomes a looming cliff, taller than even him. And when the cliff becomes an overhang, and her scent grows the strongest, he halts. There is evidence of her here, evidence that someone has spent a lot of time in this place. He looks west, through the latticework of tree-trunks and jungle-vines to the specks of grey-blue he knows to be the ocean, as a breeze sweeps in through those little cracks. It lifts the heat that had been building, and the first spattering of raindrops ricochet off the dense canopy above him.

If this was where she had been spending her time, maybe she would be back before the storm. 

If not, well, he had nothing but time.

Levi

so scream you, out from behind the bitter ache.