This is a sunset, too.
This is a sunset.
This was written in the earth and the stars. This was written on their flesh by the rain, once. This was written like the gravity between them, like the river, like the hazels. This is inevitable, and she hears the word in Cordis’ cadence. This is inevitable. This is a sunset. This is the last sunset. This is the last.
This is an ending.
She wants to melt into her like gold is meant too.
She feels soft like gold. She wants their skin and their bones to fuse. She wants to be one, but she knows where that leaves them. She knows that passion and magic and sunsets on rivers by hazel leave them with more of the innocent that they cannot protect. She knows that they cannot even protect themselves. But she also knows that they were beautiful as children, that she was burning silver, and he, the perfect alchemy. She knows that he is beautiful still even if she has run him out into the woods to keep him safe.
She knows that he will be better as a wild thing.
They all could have been.
‘She is his prize,’ her lover says and Spyndle wonders how many deaths she has suffered already in this moment, how many times her skin has been peeled off her bones, how many times her innards spilled out in tribute to the great evisceration. She wonders if it had been thousands. She wonders if it has been thousands for the cost of one promise.
‘He doesn’t let go of prizes easily.’
“She was our prize,” comes a hiss that does not belong between her lips; it reeks of venom and feels like sharp edges.
And when she meets her lover’s eyes at last, hers will seem clouded and dark and sadder than they’ve ever looked before, and she will say: “I know.”
It will feel like she is gasping.
It will feel like she is dying.
It will feel like everything that is wrong in the world, and she will say: “I know it won’t be easy.”
But he will always want her. He will always want to wrap his hands around her throat, dig his nails into her hips. He will always want a piece of her, to be the snapping jaws at the ends of her heels.
“He wants you, Cordis,” she’ll say, like the coward that she is and there will be pain that rattles like metal in her throat, because it would be easier to give herself to him, because she has been lost in fog and poison before and she could manage it again. Because she could die for them. Because it would be easier to die for them than to sacrifice her.
But nothing about sacrifice is meant to be easy.
spyndle
you are the prettiest thing that I will ever know