follow my voice, I am right here; vulgaris

[leliana]

leliana

she said “oh, I know that love is all about the wind
how it can hold me up and kill me in the end”

Maybe this is the time they have broken for good.

Maybe their love can only hold up to so much pressure. Maybe it was the final straw, the last breath, that did it in. As a girl, she always dreamed of having the kind of love that could fly into the belly of the sun and emerge without so much as singed feathers but life taught her such things never exist. She has spent so many years crumbling beneath the weight of the love; maybe the second she let go, it finally gave in.

These are the questions that tumble through her mind as she stares at his empty face, the features carved from stone. Her belly trembles—a fear she is incapable of feeling these days—and she feels her hold on reality crumbling beneath her. She frowns as he continues to push her away, to fortify the walls that have already been built between them, and she curses herself for ever allowing this to happen.

Why bring her here?

Why put herself through it?

She doesn’t have the answers—doesn’t know why dreams took her to these shores—and she is left with the rubble in the aftermath. She is left with his rebuttal and the ice in his voice. She is left alone.

“The first time that you left,” her voice nearly breaks but she catches it and continues, “when you drove me from Loess, I told myself that we had a love that could survive it. I told myself that you would find your way back to me.” Even when she had to lie to Adna every night—telling her stories of why her father didn’t want them living in his home any longer—even then she had believed in them.

“The second time you left, when you found me and hurt me, when you found me and walked me into a trap of your own making, I told myself that our love could survive it too. I told myself that we would find a way—that we would find forgiveness and rebuild trust. I told myself that we wouldn’t be broken.”

A tear finds its way down her cheek and her dream body begins to break apart, tiny cracks making their way across the mahogany of her skin so that the golden glow from within could begin to halo her.

“But I never thought,” here her voice does finally break, and she longs for the body back in Tephra. “I should have guessed,” She longs for the protection of her magic—for the way it pulls her into the undercurrent until she can’t breathe or feel or think. She longs for the shield, no matter how numbing. “I should have known you would be the one to stop fighting—that you would be the one to give up on us.”

Her face shatters and she feels the pressure building in her chest, that desperate, keening pain that sluices through the rest. It is agony to feel now. It is agony to memorize the edges of his cold face.

More tears fall down her cheeks, weakness that shudders through her—sending shockwaves through the ground, rippling through the dirt and sand. “I will go,” she finally manages, clutching for reality again.

“I won’t be coming back, Vulgaris. Not like this. Not ever again.”

She takes a step back, petals falling down to the ground between them.

“I am done letting what we call love tear me open. I was such a fool. I won’t be anymore.”

@[vulgaris]