She can feel the magic rising like a phoenix in her chest. Something good. Something pure. It feels like her healing once had—something that she can understand and mold and direct. She presses kisses into him and feels it responding, weaving toward him and pulling him closer into her. She wants to breathe life into him again, wants to breath in the saltwater from his lungs and then spit it back onto the ground.
But before she can, before she finishes pouring her magic into him, a voice catches her attention.
And all of the joy in the moment dissolves into pure fear.
She breaks apart from Vulgaris as her child crashes into her chest. Before she can stop herself, she is reaching down and pressing crimson lips into the soft down of Linnea. “Shh,” she is whispering as she smoothes back her hair, as she presses another kiss into her forehead. “It’s okay,” she murmurs even as she feels her heart begin to stutter in her chest, as she begins to feel her throat tighten.
Without breaking from her, she dips into her mind and feels herself freeze. She feels the memory of her daughter’s death sear into the back of her brain. She feels the pain and the darkness and when she opens her eyes to look at her husband, they are wide. It takes every inch of her strength to keep her composure, to hold her ghostly daughter to her breast, to keep her breathing even. “Of course things are okay, my darling,” she says. “How could anything not be okay when your family is with you?”
Her voice is soft and calm, despite the way that her mind whirls, the cogs beginning to turn. She knows that she has enough power within her to pull Vulgaris back, but both of them? So much of her magic has already pooled into him, a hook irreversibly sunk into his flesh and just ready to pull him back. But she knows she can’t just turn her back to her beautiful daughter and so she lets her mind wander to where her body rests in Tephra, where the vegetation begins to grow thick around her slumbering form.
“Do you trust me, little bird?” she whispers, looking up at Vulgaris, letting the question be for him too.
it's only you and me there until the darkness calls
let's face the dawn together; we'll brave whatever comes