Bound for trouble from the start
I've been walking through this old world in the dark
As if he could think of anything else but her. She had her responsibilities to Tephra, a son to love and raise, it's father to occupy her spare moments. All he had was endless stretches of time. He barely spoke to anyone, continuing to pace the ashland or brood in the salty surf that was his only refuge. They probably think him mad these people… They might be right. Nights are spent awake and gazing at the pregnant belly of the moon, wishing with all his heart that the consuming pain and loneliness would leave him once and for all. Berating in his mind the gods for this new torture they had bestowed on him. How much more? How much more could he take?
The moment in the cavern haunted him the most. Her exhausted sweat covered body pressed against his own with the newborn foal before them. For a moment he had tasted true peace. Wrenched away the second Dahmer had arrived. He was not stupid, there was something there between them besides the child they had conceived. Perhaps it was small but it wasn’t meaningless. A small dagger in his heart, twisting with every thought of that dark tense cavern. It had been best to stay away for fear of doing something he might later regret.
Moonlight shimmers off the surface of the waves, fetlock deep in the swelling surf. His gaunt frame still as his hollow dark gaze looks out into the endless sea, into black nothingness. What would it be like to be swallowed by the ocean? Magnus had done it once when he had died. The thought of sinking to the bottom, to feel nothing once his lungs had filled with saltwater… His haunted thoughts broken by the sound of his name behind him. He had not heard her come, had barely heard the whisper that floated in the breeze.
He turns slowly, the good eye unable to look at her fully. His heart threatens to burst open like a beaten piñata before her, the emotions storming his senses. She’s so close her feathers graze his side and he tenses, afraid of the moan that might escape from touches he had not forgotten. I have missed you…. Oh it’s almost too much, the sincerity of her words. How long had he been waiting for this moment? And yet…
He cannot allow his grudge to slip so easily. It would only be a bandaid to a gaping wound. They could not go on like this, a relationship based on uncertainty and what ifs. Only clarity, one way or another, would fix this.
”And I you..” Gravelly words filled with so many unsaid things. Forcing himself to meet her unsure gaze. ”Every second of every day, I have missed you.” Flaxen forelock grazing against the empty socket, tickling the raw skin there. ”I can’t go on like this Ellyse.”
Ledger