"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
How the shadow thing thrives in such terrible darkness.
It puts a thrill in his chest that he makes no effort to exorcise.
In all his years, he has never been so horribly, horribly alive. He aches with his aliveness, the shadow thing. It is the most visceral of all infections. And ironic, too, that something so intrinsically connected to death should vibrate with so much life. The heart beats something wild, frenetic, chaos in the cage of his ribs.
He wanders through this strange darkness simply to experience it. As if he might draw it into his skin. As if he is not already made of this darkness. The things (creatures, friends, allies, he will never call them monsters) do not trouble him. He is one of them, he is certain of it. This is not the first time they have met, these great, terrible, powerful creatures. They had tried to destroy him in the underworld, had sunk their razor-sharp teeth into the curve of his spine until they eviscerated the bone and he died a second, more terrible death. And now they do not spare him so much as a curious glance.
He smiles his shark-tooth smile and wanders and lets his legs carry him where they will. He has no destination in mind, only knows that he is not ready to return to Pangea. Surely news of his victory has traveled there by now, they do not need to hear it from him.
Despite the new magic thrumming in his veins, the breath still rattles as he draws it. As if it is a tangible thing dragged across ribs.
Ahead, a figure begins to emerge and, though he has lived nearly his whole life in the darkness, he cannot decide whether they are strange or familiar.
( FROM THE DESTRUCTION, OUT OF THE FLAME
YOU NEED A VILLAIN, GIVE ME A NAME )
A year in which she was not confined to an island, even if by her own design. A year where she did not bear children. A year where she was able to follow the path of different rivers and lakes and the vast ocean. Where she was able to spend time in her own company—where she could see the great whales and the small otters and the tiny fish as they flitted to and fro in their own schools.
A year in which she always remembered him, the curious feeling of being in his presence.
The way he was both his own person and something she was convinced she dreamt up.
Today though, she steps away from the water. It is always disconcerting to do, but she finds that she likes the alien feeling of dry land. The way her vision seems to change and gravity shifts, the way that her lungs seem to inflate differently, her mouth dry and scales bristling with discomfort. She can never do it for long, but that does not change the strange pleasant feeling she gets when she does it all.
As she walks, she notes the way that the shadows seem to swirl and take shape. The way that they become something different altogether, and when she sees his eyes staring out from them, her breath hitches. Her silvery eyes study him intently and she realizes that she still doesn’t even have a name for him. Not that she has a name for many things, but it feels wrong that she does not have something to call out.
Instead she gives that same strange smile, learned and not necessarily innate, as she walks closer.
“Hello,” a breathy word and then nothing as the wind comes to stir her hair.
Once upon a time, he might have recognized her anywhere.
She had been so beautiful that it pained him to look at her.
How he had snapped at her not to come any closer because he felt her beauty like a physical ache. He had averted his gaze so as to not let it cripple him any further.
He had been so weak then.
And then she had emerged from the depths of the river sometime after the weakness had been drained from his body. He had been someone whole and real and worthy then, but their encounter had been brief and she had slid back into the water and he had slid back into the shadows.
So much has changed since then. Since he had looked at her frame, heavy with child, and asked her about love. A foreign thing of which he knew almost nothing. He’d asked her as if he had any business asking it.
What would she call him? Mine.
The shark-tooth smile deepens. “You,” he breathes back, coming closer still. Darkness emerging from darkness.
He is not afraid to look at her now, though he sways on his feet the closer he gets. “Look at you,” he murmurs, which is to say that he can look at her. “Beautiful, even in all of this darkness.”
( FROM THE DESTRUCTION, OUT OF THE FLAME
YOU NEED A VILLAIN, GIVE ME A NAME )
She has wondered, so often, about him. She has thought about how he must have been something that she dreamt up—some curious imagining in the long hours on beaches and in the saltwater. He was so very different from anything that she had ever known and perhaps only because of that, she knew that he was not wholly the making of her own mind. She could never have dreamt the rasp of his voice or the curious roundness of his yellow eyes. She simply did not have the imaginative willpower to bring him forth.
But still, there was some curiously delightful in thinking that he was hers.
That she had made something that belonged to her.
The idea strikes her again, standing here before him, and there is a part of her that feels childish before him. A strange feeling for a woman who was never given the chance to be a girl. No years to learn and grow. No mother to nurture her or father to call after her. She been born and then made and then sent into the world and the story was so blurred after that that she struggles to call it a story at all.
A strange, lonely existence—but she did not know enough to even know that.
Still, she smiles, brilliantly, when he comes from the darkness (can he come from something that he is also made, of she wonders, briefly) and she realizes this is the first time they have met that has been his own territory. Before it was always in or near the water. Now she is the one who is off-kilter.
Her head dips, just a little, at the compliment, although she is not truly bashful. Evia has always known she is beautiful in the same way she learned her lungs operated so strangely underwater. It just was.
“The darkness reminded me of you from the first moment it arrived.”
Her silvery voice is a little thoughtful, nearly nostalgic, as she muses.
Her bright gaze slides back to him, finding the darkness where he stands.
The darkness belongs to him. It has always belonged to him.
But he belongs to things that stir in the shadows, the creatures that watch them, those terrible souls that had sunk their teeth into the meat of his spine and pulled him apart in Death.
He belongs to Death.
And Death belongs to him.
But he does not tell her this. He makes no effort to differentiate between Death and this all-encompassing darkness. To him, they are one and the same. They are for him and he is for them, just as she belongs to the water and the water belongs to her. How difficult she finds it to exist too far removed from its depths, so too does he struggle to exist outside of the realm of this darkness.
The darkness should remind her of him.
He is the victor, he is changed on a visceral level, but he does not gloat. He is not pompous or arrogant. It still makes his heart spasm to think that he should be so deeply connected to the darkness in her mind. To think that she has thought of him at all, that she has not needed prompting.
How cruel he had been when he’d snarled at her at the edge of the river, warned her away. How weak. But he tilts his peculiar head at her now and thinks that perhaps neither of them are the same now as they had been then.
“You have thought about me,” he says, though there is something contemplative in the ghostly rasp of his voice. He edges closer and reaches for her then, making himself solid so that he can finally feel her. Smooth and warm. “What have you thought?” he asks and then brings that strange head to rest against the smooth plain of her shoulder with a rattling sigh.
( FROM THE DESTRUCTION, OUT OF THE FLAME
YOU NEED A VILLAIN, GIVE ME A NAME )
The moment has the pitch and feel of a dream, but Evia does not mind.
She finds that she rather likes the way that time seems to slow when she is with him, the rest of the world growing still and quiet—slinking away as though to leave the two of them alone within it. Her silver eyes do not leave him, studying the soft edges of him that bleed into the darkness that swallows them. She is surprised to find that her throat is dry. Surprised that he can affect her so, but she does not mind.
Instead she leans into the pleasant sensation of it—the way that she buzzes with anticipation and feels just the slightest lightheadedness as she moves closer to her. “I have always thought of you,” she admits, not knowing how to be coy with him—her more flirtatious ways draining from her the further she is from the ocean. It leaves her vulnerable and raw and honest, not able to hide behind simpers and fluttering lashes.
He reaches for her and for the first time since they have met, she feels something solid beneath her touch. She exhales a shuddering breath, a breath that she had not even known she had been holding, and leans into him. Her silver lips explore the ridges of him—the angles and plains, the way his body is made real.
It feels like a dream come to life, a thought made whole.
She shivers beneath his touch but does not shy away from him.
“I have thought of this moment,” she admits, more honest and forthcoming than usual.
“I have thought of how it feels to have a dream of your own.”
She closes her eyes, pressing her lips to his jaw.
“How strange to want something that exists in only your head.”
He wonders what he could learn about her now.
He is something altogether different than the thing he had been the last time he’d seen her. He had been restored then, but he had still been weak. Feeble.
He had not been worthy of her company then.
And now?
Now he wears a confidence that might border on arrogance.
And yet.
And yet he is still moved by her, this creature that had emerged from the water and forced him to avert his gaze because it had pained him to look at her. He had been so wholly unused to beauty then. Perhaps he still is, but he is without weakness now.
He touches her and she touches him back and he is reminded of the frustration that had bunched up in his throat the last time he’d tried to touch her, to be touched by her. It fills him with heat, a quiet thrill that spirals through the network of his veins (and he is certain they are real now, certain that he is truly made of flesh and bone and blood).
His own freakish eyes fall closed as she presses her mouth sweetly against the hard edge of his jaw. Is it reverence? Does he want it to be? There is no conscience to warn him against the wanting of worship.
A new thrill courses through him to hear her say these things, to be the object of this affection. He smiles that same ink-black shark-tooth smile and draws his mouth away, refraining.
“So much has changed, Evia,” he murmurs in that same rasping tone, “I don’t think you made me up inside your head.” He exhales a wheezing breath, wonders if this is something he can now heal. “I think I am real.”
( FROM THE DESTRUCTION, OUT OF THE FLAME
YOU NEED A VILLAIN, GIVE ME A NAME )
Knows that there is so much of him that she will never be able to comprehend—never be able to touch. So much of him that exists in a world that is completely and wholly foreign to her. She has always been leashed to the sea. Tied to the tides of it. She has lived in the push and pull of the sea, living to the whims of first Ivar and then her unknowing—and he, well, he is so much more than that. He is so much bigger than her watery home. So much more than she would ever be able to fully understand.
And yet, she finds that she wants to.
She wants to try.
He doesn’t push her away when she touches him and she doesn’t pass right through him. Instead she is able to even feel a semblance of warmth from him that sends a shiver up her spine. “I know,” she whispers and part of her is sad that it has. Part of her is grateful. The final part is intrigued. She feels her breath fan against him and push up against her own nose, warming her scaled skin. “I think I do.”
She closes her silvery eyes and presses her forehead against him, stepping closer into him once more. “I think you’ve always been real,” she admits, pausing, trying to find words for the thoughts that clash in her own head. “That means…” she hesitates before continuing, “you belong to more than just me.”
A smile, no real jealousy or sorrow in her expression when she opens her eyes again.
He knows now that he belongs to Death.
He belongs to Darkness.
He belongs to the things that writhe in the shadows.
But he knows, too, that there will always be some part of him that belongs to her.
Because he had asked her what she’d call him and she’d said Mine.
Or, at least, that’s how he remembers it. And he had believed it then and perhaps there is some small part of him that wants to continue to believe it now.
She touches him and he can feel the heat of her breath and it calls to mind how it had made him ache to have her so close and not be able to feel her. And now he turns his head and he presses his own lips to the plains of her forehead, kisses her as sweetly as a shadow thing knows how.
He belongs to Death the same way she belongs to the sea.
But perhaps there is some small part of him that wants to believe that she belongs to him, too.
“I want to show you something,” he murmurs, drawing away from her then.
He wedges a few paces’ worth of space between them and studies her a beat before he closes those freakish eyes again. He relaxes, releasing his grip on the magic he keeps pulled tight around him, the magic that keeps him draped in shadows. The darkness bleeds away to reveal the equine beneath, a plain gray thing just like his parents, like his sister. He emits a soft glow, simply so that she can see him through the darkness, and meets her gaze with plain brown eyes.
No one else has ever seen him this way.
“This,” he mutters, taking a step toward her to bump her shoulder with that plain dark gray mouth, “this belongs to you.” He exhales a rattling breath and pulls the darkness around himself again.
( FROM THE DESTRUCTION, OUT OF THE FLAME
YOU NEED A VILLAIN, GIVE ME A NAME )
She does not understand magic. Not the kind that her father is made of. Not the kind that weaves her mother from winter itself. Not the kind that forced others to fall under Ivar’s bidding. She certainly doesn’t understand the magic that surrounds him now. This death and darkness. These things that should frighten her but instead intrigue her. Calling to her in the shadows and pulling her forward.
But she thinks, in a way, that perhaps she understands him.
Understands the weak boy she had first met with the rasping voice and nearly tangible weakness—and now the man, Alliance Champion and magician, who stands before her. At the very least, she wants to understand him, which is more than she can say for most things of this world.
He draws away and she remains, nearly demure in her innocence, in her unknowing, and she watches as the shadows bleed away from him. Until he is what he is underneath it all. Her heart stutters in her chest as she studies him—takes in the simple color, the beautiful face—before he returns to her cloaked in dark.
“I will hold it here,” she whispers, drawing her nose down to her chest. She was never one for eloquence. She had been thrust too early into maturity to ever study language truly, but she does her best to try and translate the swelling of emotion in her. She reaches silvery lips to his cheek and presses them there.
“I will show you the ocean one day,” she promises, because she is certain that she could take him there now. That he would survive. “There are places within it so dark that you lose yourself completely.” She watches him. “I always think of you when I swim through them. I go there more often than I used to.”
jamie
