hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
Three days felt like an eternity, like lifetimes stretched endlessly beneath the universe. Had she known his truths, his deepest secrets, she never would have been able to fathom so much time, most of which had been spent in loneliness. She had thought leaving him would be the hardest moment, the heaviest pain in her chest, but as one day turned into two, and two turned into three, she could feel a gasping emptiness in her belly, a longing only he could fill. She missed the quiet way he watched her, with eyes as bright and red as stars in their final moments, the way he traced her brittle bones with gentle kisses, pressed secretive smiles in the hollows filled with gleaming brown dapples. She felt whole with his neck across her withers, his dark heavy head pulling her close to his chest where she could live and die in the sound of his beating heart. It was terrifying how quickly she surrendered to her heart, how easy it was to love a complete stranger who had never seemed so strange at all. Even from the first moment, that strange day in the meadow where the world crumbled around her like shattering glass, there had been something safe and quiet and altogether right about his looming presence. When she had looked to his dark face, set aglow by the burning of those knowing eyes, she had found only concern and the absence of pity. Even if he had not understood the darkness yawning in her mind, he had instinctively understood the patterns of her heart and from that moment she was his.
Another shiver climbs along the length of her spine, burying cold teeth beneath those dark brown dapples gleaming on her narrow back. With a sort of wide eyed curiosity she inched closer to examine the wall that surrounded the isolated kingdom. It was impossibly tall and thick, made of ice and she wondered if was born of some kind of magic or if it melted and wept beneath the heat of the sun. The wall stretched as far as she could see, curving and winding and finally bending out of view somewhere in the frosty distance. It seemed impossible, improbable, but she suspected it must encircle the entire kingdom, a barrier of ice meant to protect those who lived within. Isle could not help but find it amusing that all she had wanted for so long was to find a quiet place of solitude where her mind would not ache with every thought from every passerby. She had buried herself among the shadows of the forest for that reason, using the thickest parts of the woods to avoid encounters whenever possible. But now, impossibly, Offspring had given her a home on a mountain of ice, a place that reeked of solitude except that he would be there too. There was a voice in her head, a thread of doubt worming itself into her thoughts even despite the way she tried to ignore it. It whispered to her all her fears, all her insecurities, it shone light on the worry that someday cracks would appear between her and Offspring, fault lines meant to tear them apart and turn her heart to rubble.
You aren’t meant for happy endings, Isle, this doubt whispered in her ear.
There is a sound to her left that draws the dark of her wild eyes, and it is accompanied by a scent she nearly misses because she is so unused to the cold and ice and the smell of winter that fills her nose. “Offspring.” She has enough time to whisper, to smile, to feel her face soften and shine with the undeniable affection welling up for him in her chest. And then he has closed the distance between them with impossibly long, graceful strides and she is once more pulled to the curve of his dark, scarred chest and she knows, she knows this spot beside his heart was carved out perfectly for her. She does not notice the new marking on his cheek, not at first among the cold and frost and almost-snow that flurries but does not stick to anything, nor does she notice the chill to his body, the ice at his core. She is already so cold that it does not register above the rest. But then she wiggles out of his embrace, twisting to better see his face, and she notices the new scar on his cheek so stark and bright and white against the gleaming black. Her smile fades a little, entirely forgotten in her curiosity at this marking that he had not had three days ago, a marking she had decided immediately seemed to suit him perfectly. “You’ve been busy.” She breathes, reaching up to trace the lines and curves with her pale, tickling lips. She is struck with a sudden thought, a curiosity that bubbles in her chest. “What does it mean?”
But then she is distracted by the way his mouth roves over her skin and a different kind of shiver races up along her spine. She winds even closer to him, chest to chest and then opposite shoulders touching before she turns to settle against his side and opposite from where the wind seemed to have teeth of ice. Between the immensity of his body and the heat his lips coaxed from her, like a blush burning beneath the silk strands of her dappled bay coat, the cold was suddenly bearable. With a sigh she settled her cheek against his large chest, counting the beats of his heart until the pressure in her own chest had abated some. When he speaks she smiles. “It’s only been three days.” She admonishes with a quiet laugh that softens her face, but she knows it must be evident by the way she is curled against his side that each day had felt like a strange eternity to her too.
‘There are not enough words,’ he says, ’to say how glad I am that you have come.’
Her face twists with a smile at this and her lips immediately move to trace quiet kisses along the curve of his dark neck. She reaches his jaw, only because he holds his head low in his embrace, and trails her teeth along the sensitive skin all the way up to his mouth. “I wouldn’t stop you from trying.”She whispers. There is a wild light gleaming in her dark eyes when she lands a teasing nip at the base of his heavy jaw. And then she pulls away from him, just enough so that she is standing in the narrow gate at the entrance to the kingdom, and glances back at him uncertainly over her shoulder. “You’re certain no one will mind me being here?” It was why she hadn’t tried to go in without him, why she still did not cross the threshold of the ice kingdom. “Are you sure I’m welcome here?”
Isle
