04-26-2017, 09:01 PM
out of the woods, out of the dark, i’m well aware of the shadows in my heart
The forest seemed eerily quiet, but he was used to the quiet, used to the nothing. This was different though – worse maybe, because she wasn’t here anymore, because there was no one to tell him who to be. A year ago he would have known, would have taken to the skies with those ragged black and white wings to try and find his family.
That’s what Illum would have done.
But this man, bone-white and dark all at once, is something changed, something different.
He didn’t want them to meet this man he had become, the man he had been carved into by her bone creatures and her wrath and the weight of her mind. Would Heartfire be able to see what he had done, see the things she had made him do as she lounged beside him in the nest of his mind? It seemed likely. There was very little that seemed to escape his twin. Maybe that was why no one had come for him. She had seen him at his darkest and turned away from it, protected their family from it. He understood.
So when the quiet of the forest is broken by the crush of leaves beneath hurried hooves and he lifts that dark head listlessly to the sound, he is startled by the vision of blue and white and worried relief stretched across a face he remembers only from his dreams. Illum. She says and he reaches for her instinctively, seeking the changed lines of her beautiful face with the heat of his wandering mouth. But she slows, hesitates, and it is enough to remind him that she shouldn’t be here. That he had been carved away from her just as much as he had been carved away from everything else.
His dark face tightens, deep furrows appearing like slashes of shadow along the plains of his cheeks as he shifts back and turns from her tensely. There is still a part of him that wants to reach out and pull her against his chest, an instinct that tells him to wrap a wing across her spine as he had done a hundred times before, but instead he watches her silently, stoically.
She is changed after so much time. Older and only more beautiful, still slender and young and wild in all the ways he thinks he might remember, but she is different too. Softer in a way he cannot name – he cannot possibly guess from this distance between them that she is a mother now. There is sweat dark and damp in the hollows of her hips and shoulders, across her neck and her mane clings to it. Even her breathing is changed, harsh and hurried, flaring wide and worried in the delicate black of her nose. Despite himself he frowns and takes a step towards her again, those dull and ragged wings lifting tensely as his gaze swept past his twin and behind her, searching for an explanation in the distant trees.
But he finds nothing, no reason for the worried way she watches him, for the tremble he thinks he sees waiting just beneath her skin. He is good at noticing these things now. He doesn’t move any closer, but those dark eyes remain moving and cautious, drifting from her face and away to the shadows, through the trees and to her eyes again. So blue, impossibly blue. “What’s wrong, Heartfire.” He says finally, slowly, still not understanding that she is reacting to him, that she had not seen him all along as he had convinced himself she had. That she is seeing a ghost. His voice is deeper now, quiet and like gravel, and he winces at its strangeness. It had suffered from so much disuse.
That’s what Illum would have done.
But this man, bone-white and dark all at once, is something changed, something different.
He didn’t want them to meet this man he had become, the man he had been carved into by her bone creatures and her wrath and the weight of her mind. Would Heartfire be able to see what he had done, see the things she had made him do as she lounged beside him in the nest of his mind? It seemed likely. There was very little that seemed to escape his twin. Maybe that was why no one had come for him. She had seen him at his darkest and turned away from it, protected their family from it. He understood.
So when the quiet of the forest is broken by the crush of leaves beneath hurried hooves and he lifts that dark head listlessly to the sound, he is startled by the vision of blue and white and worried relief stretched across a face he remembers only from his dreams. Illum. She says and he reaches for her instinctively, seeking the changed lines of her beautiful face with the heat of his wandering mouth. But she slows, hesitates, and it is enough to remind him that she shouldn’t be here. That he had been carved away from her just as much as he had been carved away from everything else.
His dark face tightens, deep furrows appearing like slashes of shadow along the plains of his cheeks as he shifts back and turns from her tensely. There is still a part of him that wants to reach out and pull her against his chest, an instinct that tells him to wrap a wing across her spine as he had done a hundred times before, but instead he watches her silently, stoically.
She is changed after so much time. Older and only more beautiful, still slender and young and wild in all the ways he thinks he might remember, but she is different too. Softer in a way he cannot name – he cannot possibly guess from this distance between them that she is a mother now. There is sweat dark and damp in the hollows of her hips and shoulders, across her neck and her mane clings to it. Even her breathing is changed, harsh and hurried, flaring wide and worried in the delicate black of her nose. Despite himself he frowns and takes a step towards her again, those dull and ragged wings lifting tensely as his gaze swept past his twin and behind her, searching for an explanation in the distant trees.
But he finds nothing, no reason for the worried way she watches him, for the tremble he thinks he sees waiting just beneath her skin. He is good at noticing these things now. He doesn’t move any closer, but those dark eyes remain moving and cautious, drifting from her face and away to the shadows, through the trees and to her eyes again. So blue, impossibly blue. “What’s wrong, Heartfire.” He says finally, slowly, still not understanding that she is reacting to him, that she had not seen him all along as he had convinced himself she had. That she is seeing a ghost. His voice is deeper now, quiet and like gravel, and he winces at its strangeness. It had suffered from so much disuse.
Illum