DESPOINA
He had touched her and it had been both the beginning and the end.
Because she had so desperately wanted to believe that when she had confessed to him, I am yours, that he had known it meant forever. That he had known it was the kind of promise that Despoina did not make lightly—did not make at all. She was too acutely aware of all of her shortcomings, of all of the things that made her wrong, to ever think that she would belong to someone and be kept.
She was the thing discarded. The thing abandoned. The thing left in the dark.
And he was the dark, but not the one meant for her. He was the dark that she chased. The one that she could never catch. That thing upon the horizon that would always, forever, be out of reach.
(But how she chased him still. How she longed. How much her foolish heart tried to dream.)
So although they had two beautiful babies—as dark as him, peering out of the shadows with their curious eyes—it is not enough to mend her broken heart. She does her best by them. Gods, she tries. But she knows when her attention wanders. She knows when she slips into a hellhound at night to trail the monster lurking in the woods that there is something terribly, irrevocably wrong with her.
And when she only leaves upon finding the worst, she is afraid to know what it says about her.
(Pathetic. Unwanted. Fool.)
So tonight she leaves the shadow children.
Tonight she becomes the creature of hell once more that prowls through the woods. She feels the darkness slip against her impossibly black form, her red eyes sharp, and she cries out as she rushes forward.
It is a sound of the netherworld, and as it cracks through the night, she feels herself crack too.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do
@Torryn