08-31-2016, 08:21 PM
"we pull apart the darkness while we can"
The scent before that had been worse, though. Pollock - a ram-horned stallion the colored of wet sunshine, a creature who had existed almost exclusively in the dark that waited for her when she let her eyes close for too long. She remembers bucking beneath his weight, how his mouth had hung hot and damp against the side of her dark neck when he took everything from her. She remembers how it felt when her spine cracked beneath his hooves, when her body broke in the dirt beneath the battering of horns and that ugly, crooked smile. His scent haunts her still, even now, and she wonders how he had found her again.
But the scent that finds her now is possibly the worst of all three, and the very instant it touches the skin of her nose with its strange, muted familiarity, she is only agony inside. Something dark builds in her chest, both a pressure and a pain, and she finds that she cannot breathe around the weight of it. She turns, spilling from the shadow solid and blue and rigid with an intensity that boils in her veins, with a fear that this scent is just the whisper from a dream, that no matter how long she looks she will never find him.
She has already looked for years.
But as she peels from the trees, feeling the bite of bark when it grabs at her indigo flesh from moving too quickly, too carelessly, she finds the scent is more than just the echo of a memory. Her face darkens, a mask of pain and shadow and fury, a mask of relief, because she would know him anywhere. Even ruined like this, trapped in a wasted body. She remembers the soft black of his skin, the band of shapes (and how she hates those particular shapes) around the base of his foreleg, she remembers emerald and navy tangled in the thickness of his dark mane. She remembers innumerable nightmares chased away in the warmth of the curve of his powerful neck.
“Erebor.” She breathes his name in a broken way, frozen several strides from him in her unwillingness to move closer. They are different now, she as much as he, though in very opposite ways. Where he is just a shadow of who he used to be, she is brilliant and blue and wild. There are long horns arching from the curve of her nose, horns she had earned from a different set of impossibilities, horns she had earned in his absence. She slips closer, softening, languid in her uncertainty, in her disbelief. “You.” This word is the echo of a memory, but somehow it forms on her tongue and pours from her lips.
She hadn’t meant for it to happen, but the distance between them disappears and his faded scent of forest and dust is all she knows in the whole world. Everything fades. Pollock, death, the Chamber, her kingdom, all grey and quiet in the back of her mind. She touches her mouth to his neck, to his shoulder, tracing the fluttering of his pulse beneath the smooth satin black because at least this way she can be sure he is real. But this only infuriates her, this pulse beating against her lips, his tangibility, and she pulls away with ears pinned and the flash of gleaming teeth.
“You said it would be easier together.” She throws this accusation like a punch, and those aching green eyes gleaming like emeralds trapped in a burned earth never leave his face. “But you left.” She turns from him, furious, pacing, but she never strays too far lest the lines of his body grow soft at the edges and he disappear into nothingness again. When she loops around again she is sucked into his gravity and so she drifts, coming close enough to touch him though this time she will not. Instead she watches him with that wildness she has come to be known for, with a darkness that bleeds into every hollow and curve of that indigo face. “I trusted you, Erebor.”
MALIS
makai x oksana