"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
" i could be ugly in loving you. filthy and soft-mouthed. wolf-tongued and terrible.
i could carry my heart in my mouth like a bird dog to you, so gently i wouldn’t leave a mark. "
Does he remember being a child, being soft and gentle the way his mother hoped he would be? Can he still pronounce the name of the soft animal of his heart or is the memory gone entirely? When he met her, he thought maybe everything before was just a dream. Maybe he was just walking through illusions and biding his time until the world gave her to him – gave him to her. Her name felt like fresh magnolia petals sweeping over his lips every time he said it but she tasted like a monstrous desire. The night they met, he swore he’d devour the earth’s core if it meant getting even the scraps of her love.
And so he was punished.
And so he was torn in two, an animal with its foot in a trap and a raw-skinned heart each clawing each other apart.
He let an entire war hollow him out from the inside until she dipped her fingers between his ribs and pieced him back together the way only she could. Queen of his life, he loved her enough to stay even when the skeletons in his closet all rattled their jaws in Morse code: get out. leave. run. Vulgaris knew there was nowhere left to run and the singularity of her love had come to crush him. And he said please, he said thank you.
Just as quickly as they fell in love all over again, though, she burned like a forest fire and came back a new shade of red that couldn’t love him up close. Her tender touches and promises of love were all dried up, the way they should have been the first time he fucked up, and it left him bleeding out onto the floor. His bones call out for hers and drive him from Loess, to where ever someone mentioned a woman red like everything he ever wanted in this world. His lungs burn from ceaseless running (toward her, for once) but he doesn’t allow himself to admit the way it hurts. Nevermind the way his legs feel like they may wear down into dust. Nothing matters except just seeing her again.
Tephra isn’t an allied kingdom and he really shouldn’t come barging in after threatening to unleash war on all of Beqanna. But her scent is a siren call and he just keeps running until he sees her standing, alone and bright like a newborn sun. Maybe he shouldn’t touch her and maybe she’ll be disgusted by the feeling of his scales against her holy skin but thoughts cost too much energy right now. His body just seeks out its favorite roost and he presses his side to hers, chest heaving for breath with a mouth like a desert.
He presses his face to her neck and curls tighter against her, closes his eyes tries to ignore that they are not home. Just feeling her body next to his like this breathes life back into the oasis of his heart. The smell of her hair makes the verdant fields of him flourish and bloom, all for her. Part of him wonders if she knows he would still move mountains if she only asked, he would tear them down into the sea and rebuild them in her image so the world could know what it’s like to love her.
“Please just pretend we’re still in love,” he says as he begins to catch his breath. “Give me one more day where I deserve your love and we’re together.”
He keeps his eyes closed, tries to imagine that they’re in Loess and their children are playing in the distance. He imagines she’s happy and smiling at him the way she did just weeks ago. He imagines everything doesn’t hurt.
When she left Loess that day, she did not expect for Tephra to call her home.
She did not expect for the pieces of her to click into place—for the impact of the last few months and years to swing at her with its gravity, knocking so much of her heart back into its new place. Its wrong place. The memory of his attack on her, of him leading her into captivity, into the leadership of Loess—all of them, they are all culpable in her mind—flares in her breast. It burns like a star; she cannot ignore it.
She cannot ignore the overwhelming fury that burns like justice.
She cannot ignore the need to protect the weak, to topple the cruel from their positions of power.
It is a foreign desire—nothing like the kind, calm healer of her past—and yet it feels perfectly in place within her. She does not question the way it sets like a stone or the way that she grips her fist around the calling. She doesn’t question how easily Magnus had agreed once she had talked with him; how much he had understood, his own golden eyes flaring with fury and that locked away blood thirst.
She doesn’t even question that she now sits with one of Beqanna’s four crowns atop her brow.
(She never wanted this, never wanted power, and yet it suits her well.)
All of it makes sense. This rushing river of destiny that carves out new shores, flooding her veins with a magic she doesn’t understand, washing away the rest of her. It leaves no imprint on her heart—gives nothing for the fingerprints of her family to hold onto. It becomes clinical in her mind, and although she cares for them—it is the way the sun may care for the plants that blossom. It is not enough to bring her down to earth any longer. It is not enough to keep her shackled and bound and mute.
She stands amongst her home, her kingdom, when she feels him cross the border. She feels the exhaustion in his limbs and desperation in his heart, and she angles her head in thought. When he rushes to her side, pressing flesh to scales, there is a piece of her—buried so deep within her—that nearly shakes loose. It vibrates in response—an alien fear and an unquenchable hunger for more melding into one powerful roar.
But it cannot stand against the rest of her.
So while she hesitates for a second, stands still so that he might bury his head in her mane, might recreate this moment, she does not reciprocate. She merely absorbs it, burning all the brighter for it.
“I can’t pretend that nothing has changed,” her voice a whisper, a kindness—the only type that she can give him now. “You love a ghost.” He loves a girl that pressed quietly into his chest. A girl that cried into his neck. A girl that loved him when he drove her out of their—his—home. A girl that loved him even when she knew that he loved another. A girl that loved him even when his love left scars on her wings.
A girl that loved him enough to let him lead her and her children into captivity.
But she isn’t that girl any longer and she doesn’t bend now; she couldn’t even if she tried.
“You can stay here with me, as I am,” her voice echoes in her mouth, and those secret chambers of her hope he will—want to beg him to accept. Want to claim him and hold him close. Hoard these reminders of herself. Her golden eyes flare radiant as they find his own, the solemn lines of her lovely face carved as if from the volcanic rock that rests behind her now. “You can stand with me against Loess.”
" i could be ugly in loving you. filthy and soft-mouthed. wolf-tongued and terrible.
i could carry my heart in my mouth like a bird dog to you, so gently i wouldn’t leave a mark. "
When all his memories come crashing down on him, he thought for certain he would drown in the riptide of it. Remembering all the pain and agony he had inflicted shriveled him into a husk of who he once was. He had let it tear through him and stitch him back together all different, all new and old at once. But while the world seemed to spin too fast, too eagerly, his heart remained his compass and it continued to point to his true north – to her. As long as she was near, he knew the fog would clear and everything would settle the way it was meant to. Leliana could cradle his faith and call him back to reason with just a tired smile.
And now she is gone. The compass turns east, then west, then east again in search of its other half tireless and frantic. He’s never been in the sea but he imagines this is what his father felt as he took his last breaths in the waves. All for just the illusion of his love. Vulgaris used to wonder why he would dive headfirst into the cold depths when he knew it couldn’t be her but suddenly he understands more than he would like to.
But his heart does not go soft, does not gleefully surrender itself for just a taste of what used to be, what could have been. It snaps its teeth and slams its fist against the cold stone of her until its knuckles bust open and dribble blood. His heart roars and dares the sky to answer. Vulgaris would pluck the strength from every other magician and chew the cosmos from their marrow if it meant bringing her back to him. Her power is a volcano but his love is a thousand suns, burning for eons with no concern for time or entropy. Even in death he would continue smoldering for her.
He hears her and it twists the knife already buried to the hilt in him. The fields threaten to blight but he steels himself against it, forces himself to keep holding her like it could ever be enough. It was never the quiet of her that drew him in, never the forgiveness or the way she submitted so softly to his will even when it defied her own. It was the way she remained steadfast in her ways and yielded nothing of her core to anyone. She was a revolution of kindness, a tender heart that could sway nations if it only cared to try. Leliana commanded strength without lifting a finger.
But this new woman, she’s heavy-handed and devoid of that war cry of love. She keeps all that summer-love sealed away and forgets the combination to the safe. Still, Vulgaris doesn’t speak out against her. He lets her hoard away her ghost when he wants to be locked away with her.
“I will love that ghost until my bones turn to dust and time forgets our story, and then I’ll love her for a hundred millennia more,” he says in between kisses across her neck. He pauses when she gives her offer but he knows he cannot stay here in a kingdom that has never known him before. (He wants to, he wants to live and die here if it means being close to her.) The thousand suns within him do not flicker, nor do they yield even a fragment of their raging heat. “But I cannot stay here. I’ve done too much wrong in my life and I won’t add to it by turning my back on them.”
He hates the way the words sound in his mouth but they just keep coming now.
“It’s my fault you hate them. They believed in me and you want them to pay for it… so I will pay with them.”
He hesitates before he pulls away from her side but he lets his sad eyes meet hers. An apology could never be enough and he knows it, so he resigns himself to the fate she wants. Vulgaris gives a slow, shuddering sigh as he imagines his sister raising their children somewhere far from here, somewhere they can be happy and free from the awful life he’s built for them.
If only it was enough to dig into the core of her and pull her out from where she stands, the fires of her new powers whipping around her, blurring her vision. But even though the winds die down in the wake of his fevered kisses, even though her vision nearly clears, it cannot overpower the tsunami of magic that has taken a new life of its own within her. The magic that roars in her mind and molds her anew.
Into something dangerous and powerful and distant.
Into something that stares into the sun as she once looked at her family.
Pieces of her break when he proclaims his love and then refuses her offer. Pieces of her shatter beneath it, but they are beneath the current, so deep within the vast oceans of her that she can barely feel the aftershocks. She merely studies the way his lips feel against the dapples of her neck, the heat of it, the insistence of it. She wonders at the woman she had been who had gladly buried her head in the sand.
The woman who would have traded every injustice for just an hour in the afternoon glow of him.
Who turned a blind eye to the injustices caused by his own hands.
She can’t anymore; she can’t.
“I don’t hate them,” she says, her voice even, “but I will see an end to the cruelty.” She lifts her eyes again so that he can see the depths of her words when she says them, so that he can understand just how much she means them—the weight of it. “If that’s your decision, then I will let you make it.” A pause as she considers him. “But our children need to come here or be sent somewhere safe.”
She breathes in deep, feeling it settle into her lungs—all of the knowledge that now blooms in her.
“Return home then—go to your King and give him a message from me.” The ground beneath her begins to vibrate just barely and it rattles up through her as she inhales deeply. “Tell him he is to release every healer and every captive that he currently hoards in Loess and reverse every wrong done by the kingdom.”
It doesn’t matter who gave the first order. It doesn’t matter that the core of her loves the man who issued it. It doesn’t matter that it was an order given in the storm of the loss of his mind.
None of it matters so long as the ripples of it can be felt through Beqanna.
“Tell him he can choose that or the next time I return to Loess, I’m bringing the heavens down with me.”
" i could be ugly in loving you. filthy and soft-mouthed. wolf-tongued and terrible.
i could carry my heart in my mouth like a bird dog to you, so gently i wouldn’t leave a mark. "
He has always believed that he is only as good as his word, that honesty was his only redeeming quality, if he had any at all. It keeps him here and forces his tongue when he proclaims all his sins against her skin like a confessional booth. Vulgaris trusts her with every ugly inch of him because in her palms they are raw and real and safe from being twisted into some beautiful lie. She is the only one who sees him for what he is and loves him in spite of it. Or at least, she used to be. Maybe now her collection of his secrets is just a grain of sand at the beach, innumerous and useless as the next. It used to mean the world for him to give them to her though.
She demands that their children relocate and he laughs, a sound like tired feet shuffling across creaking floorboards. Not even the greatest mages in all corners of Beqanna could command their brood to obey. They have raised their girls to be fierce and unyielding to even the heaviest hands. Their compasses point them to whatever bright future they hunt that day.
“Adna has started a family of her own in Loess. When her child is born, she won’t leave without a fight. And you and I both know Sabbath will follow her to the ends of the earth,” he says with a smile that is weighed down by the dreams it cradles. Did she know they were going to be grandparents, or would she have to use her magic to learn that? “Malca and Linnea will do as they please, but I will try to bring them to you. Larke and Chronos.. they need someone who will hold them while they sleep and kiss them when they have nightmares.”
He hesitates and lets his gaze drift toward the setting sun, washing the snow red and gold in Leliana’s likeness. He speaks as though he’s dying and he supposes that he might. To fall by her hand would be a suitable end, he thinks. One last war waged alongside Wolfbane after he kisses their children goodbye. Vulgaris can’t be mad at it.
“If you take one step into Loess with even the thought of her destruction, I will defend her until my dying breath.” He looks back at her, forces his chin up and dares to look her in the eye – sage green meeting depthless gold. The thousand suns of his heart burn bright as ever for her but he is only as good as his word, and he swore an oath to defend his home. “So you bring your heavens and I’ll bring you my hell.”
He wants to kiss her goodbye because he knows that the next time they meet will not afford him such luxuries, but he refrains. Vulgaris forces the emotion from his face as he turns to leave. Inside, his heart is nothing but a bloody pulp still slamming itself into her stone wall.
![[Image: avatar-1975.gif]](https://i.postimg.cc/8PxJp5dv/avatar-1975.gif){kind=avatar}
