but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need
all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees
She should be more afraid of the shadows than she is.
She should have, at least, a cursory respect for it—should tremble at the things that crawl within it. Her mother, after all, is Queen of the shadows and commands the darkness and she knows what lives within the woman’s heart is anything but kind. But despite this knowing, and despite the acute awareness of her own inexperience, she does not turn her cheek toward it—does not run when he stalks forward.
Instead, Aurorae just lifts her pretty head and watches him with a calm gaze, her feet firmly planted on the ground. He moves, his voice grating and rough, and she doesn’t smile still, but there is something like the promise of it playing around her too serious mouth. “I imagine it is not sometimes,” she muses, wondering what it must be like to be dead—to feel the eternal coldness of it settle into your chest.
“I feel like the afterlife must be bleak always.”
There’s no pity there or sorrow for what he has felt. She feels the stirring of curiosity and the otherworldly pull of gravity toward things she should avoid, a hook in her belly—a hunger she doesn’t understand. The grating fury buried in his voice should drive her away and she instead finds herself pulling closer as she feels the weight of the stars begin to dot the sky above them. She could pull them down, she thinks. Could bring the cold fire of their life between them, but she prefers the darkness.
“Dacian,” she murmurs his name, meeting his gaze. “I am Aurorae.”
