The dark becomes a distance that swells between them, and though she can feel it pushing them apart she does not know how to fix it. He is wounded by this perpetual night, and when the sun clashed with the moon and the sky fell away, she is certain part of him fell away too. More than meat and muscle, more than the rhythm of the heart inside the cage of his chest. It is like she can feel how the dark roils inside him, more wild than it’s ever been.
Her mistake was in giving him space. She thought it might help him heal a little, but he is like stars untethered and the more space she gives him, the farther he drifts. The further he falls.
She can feel him always though, and she’s never mentioned it, never asked if he can feel her too. But it is as though he carries a piece of her inside him, and it is impossible for the compass of her heart to ever point anywhere else. So when she wakes once more to the sound of bones clattering together, she rises too. He is gone long before she can catch him, so heavy with child, but there is no swell of fear when only the dark greets her searching eyes.
“I will always find you.” She promises to the silence.
She trails him for a long while, staying close to the narrow rivers of Tephran magma that cross the land like unwalkable paths. It does nothing to alleviate the more distant shadows, but at least it is easier to see where to place her opal hooves. When she finds him he is still, standing like carved quartz in the endless dark and she is glad for whatever thought it was that shackled his feet. “Hello.” She whispers, and she is careful to hide the strain from her voice and the way the muscles along her stomach tighten in the silence that follows.
She breathes, and the sound is only faintly ragged.
Her lips find the broad bone of his shoulder, tracing the ridges and valleys with kisses placed like the constellations that live inside her chest. She misses the warmth of him, the substance of a body to curl into especially in this perpetual dark, but she is no less glad to settle beside him and trace her lips along the curve of his jaw. There is still a heaviness in her chest though, the weight of not knowing what to do or say or how to fix this. She knows it bothers him to be this way, can see how he watches his sons and daughters when the night takes them, too. And maybe that’s the issue, that it is something taken from them, a freedom robbed. She can understand that.
“It’s weird,” she says, and her eyes drift up to a sky trapped in a moment, to a dark pupil ringed in pale light, “I don’t know what time it is, or even how many days have passed.” She frowns, but her brow is immobile beneath the thick mask of bone that sits on her face. “And I should probably be terrified, but I’m not because I still have you.” She looks back over at him, tracing the teeth on the side of his jaw, the empty sockets and incomplete circles of each nostril, and she imagines she can see the pain etched there. “As soon as I’m done having our thirteenth child,” she pauses because that number is incredible to her, impossible, “I’m going to march right up that mountain and find the sun again.”
A kiss to his jaw, the curved bone alight in the closeness of her glow. “I love you.”
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love