I’ve tried to be alone.
Ilka considers this for a moment and her face changes, it darkens and drops and disappears within itself. Alone. And she can feel her heart stretch thin, so thin, until the skin rips and tears and crumbles to dust within the bone cage of her aching chest. “I don’t have to try.” She says, she confesses, and this truth will undo her. She thinks of Ledger and Shah and the purple stallion, she thinks of her children – how can it be that they are any part of her? But they are, and they are gone and she has only the memories, those twinges of heartache tangling in her chest, and the dark of her shadow nestled at her heels. Nothing else has been so permanent. She is not enough, will never be enough; she is the kind of broken that won’t and can’t and shouldn’t be fixed.
She inhales and the sound is ragged in her chest, like the wind rattling branches and loosing leaves from their moorings. Her eyes flash to Cordis and they are bright and sad and lonely and the brightest gold they have ever been, and she can feel that color spreading like poison. It bleeds into the black of her face until there is only gold, only bright, down her neck and across her sides until the only black left is that of the shadow perched unwavering beneath her. “Gold.” She says suddenly, quietly, a tremulous whisper torn from unwilling lips. “Gold?” She says again, more uncertain this time.
She blinks and the gold is gone, like her shadow has crept back over her skin because nothing should ever be so beautiful. “What’s wrong with me, Cordis?” She asks and it is the kind of question she doesn’t really want answered, the kind of answer she supposes does not exist. But the lonely in her asks anyway.
Her eyes close once more, long enough for seconds to bleed into years and eons, long enough for worlds to be born and die again, and only then do they open, that gold blooming like starlight in Cordis’ direction. And then those eyes slip beyond the silver mare, to a place that had moments before been a smooth slope of grass and wilted flower but was now, impossibly, a slash of cold water between two dirt banks. “Was that always there?” She breathes, just a whisper of fragile sound as she inches past Cordis to find her reflection.
ILKA
makai x oksana
this is so random and awkward i kind of just decided to time-leap around with the things that have been happening to her so i'm super sorry if it's terribly confusing D: