[private] my kingdom come undone, firion

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU

IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU

She has been swallowed whole by the darkness, and she is sure she bleeds it now. 

Shadowed fingers had gripped every thought, every memory, tugging and knotting them until she could no longer follow their tracks. Every thread of sanity stripped until there was nothing left to hold onto, every crevice of light shuttered closed.

Nothing feels real.
Nothing is real. 

She remembers seeing her, and seeing him, and remembers that her skin had bruised from where he grabbed her but the darkness was too firmly rooted into her and it swept that away, too. It didn’t want her to have anything to anchor to, knew that its control could only last as long as she was unmoored and aimless.

Nothing is real.

She falls back into the pattern of crafting her own reality, of ignoring when her mind tries to fool her into thinking someone is there. She used to fight it, used to rail against her own mind as the anger licked like flames inside her chest because to constantly be taunted and teased was more than she could bear. Anger was such an unfamiliar emotion to her but she lost herself to it, because set against the darkness it was blinding and bright and it seared some kind of life back into her.

But, as is her nature, she always submitted eventually.

It was easier to let them toy with her.
It was easier to go along with it, to pretend that whoever tried to appear before her was real—their words and their touch, their face and their voice. They were dreams but at least they were her dreams.

And she clings to them because they were all she had, because clinging is what she has always been best at.

It’s why when she sees him—a flash of golden eyes and a jaguar-marked coat she knows better than anything—she is, for a moment, stripped bare. Their eyes lock and she looks at him instead of through him in the way she had grown accustomed, but he is gone faster than she can find the breath to speak. He is gone, but the feeling he evokes doesn’t fade. Desperation and determination, panic and fear—he was here, she was so sure of it, but the darkness that followed her bombarded her, quickly suffocating this light that was trying to break through.

He was real.
He had to be real.

And she is not sure what it is that he leaves behind but she follows it.

She does not know how he found her in this strange in-between, does not know why he didn’t take her with him (because he isn’t real, he isn’t real, none of it is) but she follows him regardless. 

Her astral projection and teleportation fight her, reluctant and tired and seemingly unwilling to fight through the barriers that kept her here, but she is so sure that he was real that she is relentless. Even when she can feel herself wearing thin and growing exhausted she sinks herself into the hope that so briefly bubbled in her chest and she drowns herself in it.

It happens seemingly by accident that she stumbles out into a familiar mountain kingdom, and she sucks in a startled breath of pine and wisteria and almost immediately it is stolen from her.

She stands, trembling and wavering, glowing too brightly and stardust cascading from her wings. Somewhere inside her scarred chest a regrown heart is beating too hard and too fast, and panic rings the edges of her nearly black eyes as she searches frantically for the figure she had been chasing.

When she finds him the relief floods every inch of her, crowding the darkness into far corners and reminding her what it feels like to be able to breathe.

“You were real,” she whispers in a kind of disbelief, and she is almost startled at the way her voice sounds back in the reality she had thought was lost forever—it seems loud and harsh, and inwardly she cringes away from it. “I knew you were real,”  she continues and though her voice is still breathy and broken this is said with a firm conviction, as if she could look her doubt in the eye and tell it it had been wrong. She doesn’t realize that she has been stepping forward this entire time, that she is now standing directly in front of him and staring into a pair of familiar gold eyes. “Firion,” she stumbles on his name but she presses her nose to her son’s neck with an unshakable certainty, and for the first time in far too long the ground beneath her feels stable.

AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE

[firion]

FIRION

He does his best to move on.

Does his best to pull himself together, stitch together the gaping wound that is his heart. He builds something of a life with Mazikeen. He remains rooted where his entire life has been spent running. He builds and he ignores the fact that his very flesh cries out from the injustice of it all.

Sleep does not visit him, not anymore.

Were it not for his magic, he supposes he would have descended into madness long ago, but the demonic power that now thrums through his veins is enough to keep him whole. It shields his mind from fracturing completely and he holds onto it with whatever strength he has left. And when Mazikeen sleeps, he leaves.

Perhaps not in body, for often he chooses to rest next to her regardless, but in spirit. His mind closes in on itself like a dying star and he throws his power out in increasingly wider circles. He practices every night until he casts it further and further. Until his magic does not splatter against the cosmos but instead spears through them like a hunter—precise and deadly and desperate. Searching and searching for purchase.

Until he finds it.

Slippery as it may be.

He finds that thing which feels like her and the relief is so tangible, so potent, so overwhelming that he nearly collapses beneath the weight of it. Nearly loses his grip on the magic that keeps him there at all. It takes everything in him to leave behind the trail that he does as he slips away from her—so fast, so fast.

When he lands again, back in Hyaline, his breath his short and his body slick with sweat. He pulls himself to his feet as quickly as he can and plunges into the night, casting his magic over the kingdom and the rest of Beqanna until it picks up on her. Alive. Here. Again. He folds the fabric of distance between pinched fingers and steps through the shadow portal, spitting out near the archangel in a moment.

He pulls her to him before he says anything, crushing her close and burying his head in her neck. “Mom,” he whispers against her, the shadows pulling tight around his legs with the same smothering force of his own relief. “You’re here,” is all he manages, his voice thick with tears unspilled.

so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)

@Ryatah

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU

IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU

The sound of the tears in his voice feels like someone physically breaking her heart in two, and the wave of guilt that crashes over top of her is enough to drown beneath. 

She has worked hard over the past several years—starting with Firion being born—to rebuild her life. To dismantle all the fragmented pieces of herself that she had been holding onto and finally let herself grow into something almost brand new. The way that Atrox had anchored her had allowed her to be there for her children in a way that she never has before, or at least, not since she had been with Dhumin (though that was less of an anchor and more like being shackled; looking back she is not sure how she ever could have mistaken that for love).

For all her deconstructing and attempts to be something better, she still found a way to let him—and the rest of them—down.

She still disappeared when they needed her.
She still hurt them even though it had never been her intention.
She still left a trail of destruction in her wake, and she was still nothing like the angel she was made out to be.

That guilt is pushed down when she reflexively returns Firion’s embrace, pulling him closer, tighter. He is taller than her and she wonders when that happened, when he went from being her sweet little boy to a man that reminds her so much of his father that it makes her heart hurt in the best way. “I’m here because you found me,” she says, and though her voice is quiet when spoken around the tears the disbelief is still tangible. “How did you find me?” she asks into his neck, afraid of letting him go, afraid that in doing so she will somehow be sucked back to all she had been trying to escape from.

AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE

@firion

[firion]

FIRION

It never occurs to him that she could feel guilty for what has happened to her. That it would ever feel to her as some kind of personal failure—some letdown. It never once crosses his mind that he should be easing her own guilt, soothing her own soul, and thus he doesn’t say anything to it. He just holds her close, as if he could erase all the time stolen from their family. As though he could somehow rewind what has occurred and bring them back to the beginning, to the moments before it had all happened.

“Of course I found you,” he says, his voice still thick. “Of course I did.” But it doesn’t feel like an of course, not to him. It doesn’t feel like a given because, god, how long had he searched for her. How long had he been trying to pull her back to them. The tears spill then, sliding down his golden cheeks and illuminating his already over bright eyes. “I am so sorry it took me so long. I am still not used to this magic. I should have tried to find someone more experienced, someone better—”

He cuts himself off, swallowing hard, and then smiles through the tears.

It’s a gift that he has mastered over the years and he does it now, his expression softening as he swallows the pain down to settle in his belly. He would deal with it later, he thinks. He wouldn’t unload all of this grief on her to bear when she is already dealing with the aftermath of her own trauma.

“I followed the thread of you,” he tries to explain. “All of our family has one.” He flings his power upward and there is a tangle of bright lights threading together, a collision of color. Amongst them all is a single ivory one, brighter than the rest and he plucks it out as the others fade.

“Yours is the brightest. I just followed it home.”

As if it was that easy. As if he was that successful. 

so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)

@Ryatah

[Ryatah]

Ryatah

WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU

IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU

She can feel the tears that slide down his cheeks as if they are sliding down her own, and she pulls back to gently brush them away. “There is no one else I would have wanted to find me,” she tells him, quiet but earnest, catching his golden eyes and holding them with hers. “I know you did all that you could, Firion. And I never doubted for a second that you were not looking for me, or trying to figure out how to get me back.” She knew that none of her children would want to sit idly by as she drifted in the unknown; she knew none of them would accept the idea that she, the one that death never seemed to keep, had suddenly succumbed to it so easily.

And of all of them, she knew Firion would fight back the hardest.
She knew that he would push his magic to the limits, knew that if anyone could piece together what happened and know where to find her, it would be him.

She watches, at first in confusion and then in fascination as he tosses magic into the air as if it is a tangible thing. The kaleidoscope of colors reflects against the glossy almost-black of her eyes, and she exhales a soft note of surprise when all that is left is a single thread—her thread—bright and shining. She reaches for it without touching, hovering close enough that the light of her aura collides with the light of the thread, and a small smile touches her white lips.

“From the moment you were born I knew you would be great,” she tells him, her gaze shifting from his magic back to his face, and her chest aches with the pride that swells there. Aislyn had been their first, but Firion was the first to be born after the love that existed between her and Atrox could no longer be denied, making him a first in his own right. She did not play favorites—she loved all of her children endlessly—but she could not ignore that there was something about Firion that set him apart from everyone else, even from her other children with Atrox.

There were so many moments spread out over the course of his life that had told her he was different; it made letting him go when he had left all the harder, but she knew whatever greatness he was destined for would not happen trapped at her side. Now, she touches her lips again to his cheek, to the place where the tears had dried against his skin—focusing solely on him so that she does not have to look at how the edges of her reality still felt blurry and unsure. “And I was right.”

AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE