DESPOINA
Despoina doesn’t know what she is without her sorrow.
It has been her only companion—the only constant in her life. From the very first, it had been there with her, when her mother had nearly torn her to pieces. When she had instead abandoned her in the den. When she had found a brief reprieve amongst the family of skeletons and wolves, it still been there. She could not see the loud, boisterous family without knowing, in her bones, that it wasn’t her family to have.
It had followed her when she had fled.
When she had tried so desperately to get that demon’s attention for longer than a second.
When she spent years on her own—always alone.
But he managed to make her feel something different. Something new. He managed to make her feel anger and frustration. Managed to make her feel hunger. And when he approaches her, presses his nose against her, there’s something new again that blossoms in her chest: need. Want. Desire.
It makes her gasp, something sweet that whistles over her tongue. It makes her dizzy and she nearly shifts and runs away from fear of the overwhelming feeling. Instead though she leans into it, something electric on her tongue as her teeth press through the shadows to find him beneath them. Him. Torryn.
“I am yours,” she confesses because it’s the most natural thing in the world to admit.
She almost laughs then but instead presses closer into him, her heart tripping.
“I always have been, I think.” She can’t imagine being anything but his. Can’t imagine that he was not perfectly carved for her and that she was, somehow, created for him—that he was the counterpart to her. The darkness she could never run from somehow made manifest and turned into a home for her.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do