And the saints we see, are all made of gold [ Malis]

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

It isn’t until she notices the flare of his nostrils, the quiet distaste etching itself across his dark face, that she remembers herself. The gumminess of pink and red scars like cobwebbing across the indigo of her refined face, the stink of death that clings to her skin in the same way smoke clings to his. It is hers and it isn’t, hers and the decaying mare she had fallen beside. She remembers how Pollock had seemed to love the smell, how she had stumbled across him basking in the wretchedness of it. She should have left then, left as soon as that eager wet sneer had twisted itself like a snake across the hard slash of his mouth. But Malis was a stubborn, reckless creature. It was hard to be cautious when immortal life had few lasting consequences.

Killdare exhales and smoke fills the space between them. She tries not to choke on it. There must be something that coaxes him closer, some mortal curiosity she does not understand and it is a reflex, albeit a new one, when she lowers her face so that those glittering obsidian horns reach hungrily for the soft skin at his throat. She is startled by how sick this closeness makes her feel, how easily the memory comes of Pollock touching her neck, her flank, the weight of him against her back when he defiled her. She shrugs back away from Killdare, just one step and then another, just enough so that her heart might not be crushed within the tightening of her chest.

Then suddenly, he is heat. He is fire and brimstone, rock and ash and magma and she can feel her ears pinning themselves back in the tangles of a blue and dark mane as she tries not to gag on the heat that radiates from him. Even as she tries to suppress, to push it back, she can feel a memory unfolding like a flower in her chest and she thinks she might break from it. She remembers a terrible dream that wasn’t a dream at all. She remembers and boy and his heat, his fire as she begged him to burn the wretched blue from her skin. She remembers why she left the Chamber in the first place and the walls that erect around her heart are perfect and impervious and when those emerald eyes flit back to Killdare’s face they are as cold as stones.

You smell like him. He says and for a moment, still tangled in the dangerous web of memories better off forgotten, she thinks he means her chamber prince. She thinks he means Erebor.

But then he asks if she is hurt and she remembers the wounds on her face, mostly healed but still sticky and pink and puckered with raw flesh. She remembers the cloying odor of death on her skin, the goat-stink of Pollock, and when her eyes return to Killdare’s face they are quiet and softer, lacking all of the edge from a few seconds earlier. But it is only when concern leaks like shadow across his dark face that she decides she doesn’t mind this closeness as much anymore. She doesn’t think he’ll hurt her.

She is quiet for a moment, her jaw clenching and unclenching as she works out an answer that might sate his concern. But the only thing she has for him is a puzzle and her eyes narrow on his face as she tries to decide whether he can handle it or not. In the end she doesn’t think he will, but he doesn’t have to, and as it were Malis still didn’t understand. So when she answers him it is with total, unabashed honesty- though it is wrapped in the barbs of her guarded heart. “I died, I think.” She tells him, and the sound of her spine cracking echoes in her ears. “That hurt quite a bit.” And she remembers how it felt when he caved her delicate blue face in. An echo of pain ripples through her, a healing memory, and she flinches as if struck.

She is quiet again and her eyes drift hauntedly from his face. “Home.” She repeats, tastes the bitterness of the word on her tongue as, still, she does not look at him. “Tell me about home. What is the Chamber like, now?”

Do you really think you can build anything from such a broken piece as me, she thinks but does not say as her eyes slip guardedly back to his face.

MALIS

makai x oksana

texture © hexe78

you gave me muse so i give you word vomit. woops.