etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
She is dissolving before him, but he still remains quiet. She is shattering, and still has only uttered one word (no) that rings and echoes in her ears. She is falling, falling, falling, and the only motion that he makes—the only reaction he has is to look away at the rustling of a nearby tree. That is perhaps the saddest part of this entire encounter. That single slant of his handsome, haunted head is something that will play through her memories over and over again until it is burned, seared, branded there for eternity.
Tears spring into the corner of her eyes as she realizes the futility of this exercise. She is shaking him at the shoulders, screaming at him to love her, and he cannot. It is not within his DNA—and she, she cannot fall upon this spear again and again. She is made to love and, in turn, be loved. Perhaps not in the way that is expected (she loves like the wind loves the swirling dunes of the deserts; she is to be loved as the sun loves the ever waning moon), but she is to be loved. She expects it—was raised to expect it.
And he—well, he could not.
She sighs again, and this time it is intertwined with bitter acceptance, with pain, with heartache. This time, she knows that she is closing a chapter that will never be re-opened. So, despite the fact that her lungs are alive with her agony, that every cell is burning with need to go away, she draws it out. She watches him with muddy brown eyes, tracing the hard angles of his body, his flat shark-eyes, the places where ash settle into the slopes of his shoulders and the faint traces of fire can be seen on his hide.
She studies him, memorizes him, loves him in spite of it all.
“Go, Kingslay,” she finally says, and her voice is barely a whisper. She nods her head toward the trees, the borders, the area where she is not. “You should go.” Etro feels hollowed out, and she wonders how much more she could stand (how much could one soul bear?), but she forces herself to straighten. She is a daughter of Yael and Vanquish. She is a princess of the dunes and a daughter of the desert moon. She will not let this—him—break her, even if she feels the cracks running like fault lines through her flesh.
“I will think of you,” she confesses, one more time. “I do not expect you to think of me.”
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
