"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
The shadowmare drifted.
Aimless wandering did not suit her, yet she wandered nonetheless.
But she’d been quiet - too quiet - biding her time in the shadows. But she was restless for the first time in a long time. She had come to terms that this new beqanna was foreign to her. She had not, however, truly coped with the loss of the Chamber. She’d pledged her soul to the Chamber once - a land now buried beneath this new world. Now, there were no loyalties to bind her. She was untethered, free, and as a result perhaps more dangerous than she’d ever been.
The cold woman wove aimlessly through the trees, obstacles moving from her path rather than altering her own. She had grown more familiar with her magic and far less careful. The shadows swirled in her steps and twisted within her mane and tail giving the illusion of weightlessness.
She did not register the faces she passed. They meant little to her. All she knew lay buried in the past - unreachable, untouchable.
Or so she thought.
Her heart - long silent - gives an uncomfortable lurch in her chest. The shadow of a feeling - one she’d long since forgotten - flickers through her mind and evaporates just as quickly. She hadn’t expected to see a familiar face, having long since accepted the fact that those from her past where just as unreachable as the Chamber itself. Gone. Buried.
It seems in that regard, at least, she was mistaken.
And for the first time in a long time, she doesn’t know what to stay.
What could she possibly say to someone that she’d buried so long ago?
i took the poison praying you'd feel it, too
i wrapped my neck and prayed that you'd feel the noose
He feels her before he sees her.
But then, he always did.
There had always been something in her gravity that shifted something vital in the cavern of his chest. And perhaps he has been foolish to carry the memory of her but it is one of the few he has that has been worth carrying. Time has stripped it of its color but it remains just the same, stowed away in his head or his heart, he’s never been sure which.
He had loved her. He has never been more sure of anything. In the quiet moments, the placid calm that they’d shared amidst all that chaos. She had been fierce and alive and she had not needed him to love her but he’d done it anyway.
He had not expected to ever see her again. He had contented himself with committing her to memory.
Perhaps he has imagined the fleeting flicker of recognition. Maybe she will continue on her way, skirt past him, carried by the shadows that tangle themselves around her. But the useless heart in its ribbed cage aches with its want for her to stop.
They are both changed. Her magic is greater, he thinks, and there is a kind of darkness that seems to resonate from the very center of her. But he is not deterred by it. Because it was her darkness that he loved. He has never seen it good enough reason to turn away from her. And he? He has been drained of all of his warmth, plunged into a cold world he does not yet know how to navigate.
He is not the same man who’d stood by her side for brief glimpses of time, who’d loved her fiercely but cannot remember now if he’d ever told her. He is not the same man who’d raised their daughter and set her free in the world. He does not deserve to call himself by the same name even.
But he smiles and it is that same placid smile he’d always worn for her. The only difference now is that it does not reach his eyes. “Ana,” he says in a way that sounds like relief, as if he’d been expecting her. As if he’d known they’d find their way back to each other some day, even when the opposite is true.
She’s frozen.
Literally. Figuratively.
So frozen she can feel the ice creeping through her veins.
She’s so cold when she finally lets out a breath, it condenses into twin wisps of condensation as soon as it meets the warm air. He’s exactly how she remembers - the memory engraved deep within the recesses of his mind. She cannot bring herself to move. So the ice spreads, leeching into the ground around her feet.
At the sound of her name, her heart lurches again. It’s an uncomfortable, foreign sensation. She’s become so accustomed to her heart sitting like a stone in her chest - unmoving and unfeeling - that this sensation is equal parts disorienting and disconcerting. But the sound has freed her limbs, her mind, and her memory. Slowly - so slowly - she takes a single step closer to him.
“You’re…” she pauses, looking for the right word, "...here." Her voice is still calm and cool as ever, but there is a shadow of emotion there too. Just a whisper. She could have substituted any number of words. Alive. Real. Not dead. She’d truly believed he was dead and buried with the Chamber. It all felt so permanent. She should have known better.
She still isn’t sure if she trusts her eyes. (If she trusts herself.) He looks so much the same, but so different at the same time. Time has not been kind to him, either. She can see that. She understands that.
He had not been her first love, but he had been her last. Unspoken between them, but true nonetheless.
She wasn’t sure that she even could love anymore. But the remnants of her heart before she had plunged into a world of cold and shadow had been his. They remained his. She had no claim to that part of herself anymore.
Everything had changed. She had changed.
And for the first time in a long time the shadowmare finds that she wants something that she cannot have.
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
------------------------------------------i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
The Kensley of old would have gone to her.
He would not have hesitated.
He would have touched her like he had any right at all.
He would have taken the one small step she took toward him as an invitation and plunged himself into the cold with her. He would have bled his heart dry to offer her some warmth.
But he looks at her now and he understands that she had never really been his. He had loved this about her, too. That she had never truly needed him. That she had always been just out of reach. But he’d touched her then and they’d had their daughter and it had been enough for him because he’d known better than to love wild things. Still, he has carried her with him for years. And he has protected his heart from every attempt anyone has ever made to stake their claim on it because it has never not belonged to her.
She speaks and the sound of her voice calls to mind so many memories he has kept buried. Again, he smiles and exhales and studies her face. “Yeah,” he says and he casts a glance around the landscape the spools away from them. This place is familiar, but it is the only one. “Although, I don’t know where here is anymore,” he adds. He shifts his focus back to her face then and it puts a twinge in his useless heart, even after all this time.
He should feel something, he thinks. Some kind of giddy warmth. He should feel awash in that same old glow. He should feel alive with heat and light. But he is tired and so much has changed and he looks at her now and all he can feel is so terribly adrift. Because things had fallen apart so suddenly and he has loved her all this time and he doesn’t know what that means, if anything at all.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” he admits after a moment, quiet, a faint furrow in his brow as he meets her eye, his expression plaintive.
( but you had a halo made of diamonds resting on your head---------------------------- i should be dealing with my demons but i'm dodging them instead )
She takes another step in his direction.
Followed by another.
She can feel the ice in her veins beginning to thaw, bit by bit. She wonders, idly, what he is thinking. But she’s never brought herself to breach his mind. She could see - feel - the change in him. Could he see the same in her? Time had been cruel to them both, but here they stood. Broken but breathing.
“Everything’s different,” she breathes, and the echo of distaste is evident in her voice. There’s longing there too. Longing for a simpler time. Longing for familiarity. For the past. Had things truly been easier then? When everything was familiar and she had only just stepped over the edge into darkness?
She wasn’t sure.
It didn’t matter, anyway.
There was no going back. Not now. She’d accepted the past as being out of her reach long ago, but its not to say she hadn’t nearly driven herself mad in the early days.
She couldn’t drag the past from it’s prison in her memories. Instead she set herself to a new goal - a new purpose - or else she knew she’d be lost to the darkness forever. She’d rebuild what she could. Establish a new legacy built upon the old. She wouldn’t let it all fade away into the past. She’d drag it all out of the darkness if she had to. But it had never occurred to her that she may not have to do it alone…
Another step closer. I never thought I’d see you again.
There are so many things she can say in reply. “I know,” she says, instead.
Another step.
Her gaze softens. Grows pensive, even. ”I thought it was all gone,” she breathes, softly, for it all had been gone. Or so she’d thought.
A final step.
She stands before him now. She can feel his breath, his warmth.
“Sometimes,” she mused, not drawing her gaze from him, ”It’s refreshing to be proven wrong.”
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
Oh, how it should thrill him!
How the heart should leap and thrash and rail against its ribbed cage in its want to throw itself at her feet.
Instead, it constricts. Shrinks into the darkest corner of his chest.
The breath goes thin and the eyelids flutter heavy as he tracks her progress. She is slow to close up the great swath of negative space and he tries desperately to steel himself against it. Her movements are measured and he wants to look away from her, wants so fiercely to shackle his focus to some far off focal point to stop the swimming of his head, but he is powerless to drag his gaze away. Because he has dreamed of her, carried her with him, and the eyes cannot quite believe what they are seeing.
She speaks but he is only vaguely aware of what she’s saying. Words filtered through heavy fog as they settle heavy in his head, someplace just out of reach.
There is a peculiar roaring in his head, the blood careening reckless through him, spurred onward by a mournful heart. She had not been his, he knows, but he had so completely been hers. That has not changed and he knows that it never will. He drags in a staggered breath now and knows that loving her is perhaps the only worthwhile thing he has ever done with his otherwise unremarkable life.
He swallows thickly as she comes to rest so close that he can smell her. Just as she can feel his warmth, he can feel the cold that rolls off of her in waves. He wonders what life has done to her in the meantime. She is darker at her edges, he realizes, but it makes no difference. Because the heart has launched itself into the soft space at the base of his throat and he struggles to breathe around it. The edges of his vision blur with how fiercely his head swims with their proximity.
“Don’t,” he whispers and it comes out strangled, weak. Finally, mercifully, he finds the strength to close his eyes. Don’t touch me, don’t come any closer, don’t give me a hope I don’t deserve. He is no longer the warm-eyed boy who’d stood beside her – only literally, as he’d never had it in him to be much of a leader – in the Chamber. The keen-hearted boy who’d been happy to love her even if he’d never have her. He is something weaker now, something worth resenting.
“If you come any closer, Ana, I won’t be able to let you go again,” he says and oh, how it hurts to admit it. But he does not open his eyes to gauge her reaction, just drags in another shuddering breath and waits for her to go.
She freezes as soon as the word leaves his lips. But she does not retreat. Doesn’t step away from his strangled confession. She can see the war inside him, and it gives her no pleasure to watch him struggle. She hates it - hates what time has done to him.
To them.
“If you want me to go, I will go.” Her tone is flat. Cold. But still softer than what was typical for the shadow-mare. However, she means what she says. If he truly wishes her to leave, she will disappear into the shadows. She’ll return to Pangea. She won’t seek him out. She’ll leave him to disappear from her life and her memory once again.
“But - “ she adds, the word hanging in the still air. “What if that’s not what I want,” she adds, after a brief pause. Anaxarete is not used to such vulnerability. She was not one to want. Not anymore. Now she simply takes what it is she wants. But not this. Never this. And tonight, she wanted. She wanted him to come home with her - to find life in this strange new world. To live. To thrive. With her.
She can’t remember the last time she’d encountered someone who truly had the ability to hurt her as he does. But at this point, she doesn’t care if it hurts. Everyone else has forsaken her. Everyone else has abandoned her to the darkness. Why not him, too? “What if I don’t want you to let me go,” she asks, keeping her voice neutral - her cool voice betraying nothing.
That’s why the shadows had become her sanctuary. Why the shadows welcomed her. Consumed her. They took away her pain, breathed life back into her weary bones. They filled the void left by so much loss.
“You aren’t the only one who has lost everything, Kensley,” she says.
You aren’t the only one who’s been lost, is perhaps what she means.
Anaxarete is not afraid to lose anymore. She knows how to survive. She knows the shadows will extinguish the hurt - take up residence where feeling and life once was. Turn it into something new.
Eventually they’d consume her. The shadows. The darkness.
She couldn’t bring herself to stop them. For they brought strength too. They freed her from pain and memory and regret. The moment she’d begun giving in (giving up?) is when life was breathed into her anew. There was freedom in this new power - and she luxuriated in that freedom.
The fact remained she would release him, if that’s what he truly wanted.
She could survive another loss.
Perhaps he could not.
And she refused to be the one to pound nails in his coffin.
11-07-2019, 03:34 PM (This post was last modified: 11-07-2019, 03:34 PM by kensley.)
( i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
What if, what if, what if.
He knows better than to hinge his heart on what ifs.
But he’s never had a lick of sense when it came to her.
Still, the expression is plaintive when he finally forces open his eyes and searches her face. The heart is useless anyway, he thinks. Because it beats now, even when it doesn’t have to, and he cannot remember a time when it did not belong to her anyway. He knows that he will gladly gamble his heart on this what if.
She does not plead, there is nothing in her tone that betrays any weakness and it makes his own heart ache. Because she has never needed him and he has always known that. And perhaps it speaks volumes that she wants him. But, for the moment, he merely goes on studying her face, committing all the new shadows to memory. He does not allow himself to wonder what she has done or what has been done to her in all the time that has passed. He does, however, allow himself to believe – perhaps foolishly – that they have time. They will have time. She can tell him what she wishes and they will keep their secrets.
“Then I won’t,” he says, plain. Because it really is that simple. If she does not want him to let her go, he won’t. Ever. He has carried her with him this long, he thinks, and he knows he’d gladly carry her with him to the end of the world. The memory of her, the quiet moments they had spent together, is perhaps the only worthwhile thing he’s ever had to carry.
He drags in a measured breath, remembers the way he had smiled at her once, how he’d touched her and wondered, who is there to look after you? In time, he would come to learn that she did not need looking after.
You are not the only one who has lost everything. Panic seizes him by the throat, arrests the air in his lungs. And then. And then he closes up what little space remains between them, brings his forehead to rest against hers. Touches her as if he has any right at all.
“You are the only thing I have ever loved,” he murmurs, acutely aware that the breath falls heavy and sweet on her skin. There is no shame in this, heat does not pool in his cheeks. He is not embarrassed to admit it. He has loved others, of course, his family but it was a different kind of love and he trusts that she knows the difference.
