so we let our shadows fall away like dust
She waits until they’ve gone, her sister and that awful green stallion she keeps for company, dark eyes burning furious holes in their retreating backs. Then she calls on her abilities again, that twilight magic, bending light and shadow around herself and Dovev until they disappear from view like a quiet mirage. They aren’t actually invisible, that magic is outside her reach, but to anyone passing by they would see only a distorted shimmer of hazy daylight reflecting the grassy meadow around them. It was little more than an illusion, but it was a clever one, and it would be enough to make Heartfire and Wyrm think they’d gone their separate ways should they glance back one last time.
Luster was tired of their company.
Tired of the terrible weight in her chest their arrogant eyes had forced her to hide.
The façade drops once they are gone though, once the walls of her light illusions are drawn up safely around them and there is only she and the bone-armored stallion she hardly knew but had missed in an inexplicable soul-deep way. The fire in her fades, that wild fury she had tethered to so that she could be sharp and lethal for the sake of this man she ached to call friend. She had worn it like a mask, beautiful and feral, clutched it to her face with trembling hands so that they would never guess at the cracks splintering beneath. But she let it slip now, softening as she returned to his side to brush her nose against his jaw, her cheek against his neck, sighing quietly.
As before, the bone plates that force their way out of his flesh are ringed in red, in blood, and with a soft, worried sound she draws her tongue across the wounds to clean them. It is futile, she can see this by the way new blood wells when she sweeps away the old, but it breaks something inside her to see it, to watch him hurt so needlessly, so she continues gently, quietly, stopping only if he wills her to.
Does it hurt? She wants to ask, silent, but maybe the sadness in her eyes asks for her. Does it ever stop hurting?
When she does finally pull away it is to twist and duck beneath his neck again, pressed safely to the curve of a chest she is certain will keep that ache in her heart at bay. She touches him lightly across his neck and his shoulder, reaches around to lip at the softness of his mouth, the satin of a dark chin. There are a thousand things she wants to say to him, anything to keep him at her side for a while, for the night – she can’t sleep in that cave tonight, but the weight in her chest seems to be a weight on her tongue, too, and she is only silent for him, trapped and drifting at the edge of an unnamable pain.
Then, quietly, uncertainly, with a face that is soft and blue and tremulous, beautiful in its vulnerability, she presses a kiss that is not quite empty (full of pain, full of loneliness, full of the loudest quiet) to the place at the corner of his mouth where the stars have come to rest, claimed him as their own. “Do you think,” and she pauses, softening beneath him, pulling back from that sad kiss to peer up at him with dark eyes that hide bemused smiles in their shadowy, uncertain depths, “that maybe I can know your name yet?” She is quiet again when she reaches up to trace her lips along the underside of his jaw, following a line of hard bone that rose like a welt beneath the gleaming dark of his ever-beautiful face. Then, so uncertain, dropping her mouth from his jaw to peer up at him again with soft, worried eyes, “Don't leave me this time.”
