the way she held his hands…so tender, so utterly foreign to him now, beyond his understanding when they were still slick with the blood of a thousand hearts. they were crying out from within, his own knees buckling in subservience to the light that still ached within, little more than a cavity to him for centuries upon centuries…his breath was sharp, anticipating far more than what she had ultimately given him; a choice. what else in this world belonged to him other than destiny, devoid of the very choice he thought he had committed to long ago, though ultimately denied at the gates of both Heaven and Hell as he stumbled through the world as though the womb surrounding, the blood of the earth mother and all her feeble children, pawns to a pawn… in the end, not even his anger was wholly his own, condemned to it like the festering sickness it was, aether where his tears should be. time…how much time had passed? sometimes it seemed as though it was little more than a handful of weeks. sometimes it felt as though he had been shackled in ad aeternam, bound to the wheel of fate as it spun and dizzied him, sitting rotten in his gut until it burned in his throat and chewed through all manner of wood, steel and iron. the cursed of body of ardyn izunia, having long since denied himself the name of his own forbears, had nothing in this world other than time…and it was always just out of reach. how many times had he seen this before; the heavenly host come to remind him of his debt, first drawn in innocent blood by way of the scythe…and yet, here she was, so pure of heart that it almost sickened him, be it by the pardon of her heart as she held his hand or the abhorrence that cut deeper than the scythe upon his back. ‘ sweet girl, ’ came the voice of the forgotten, the woefully ignored, THE SONGS OF SOMNUS NEXT TO NOTHING AGAINST THE ADAGIUM, EMBITTERED AND WITHOUT APPRAISAL, save for the hymns of the damned sewn into his lips with treacherous thread… and now she had come to comfort such wretched flesh. ‘ why do you stay with me? ’ his was once an honest question, barely having broken the air between them. where ardyn izunia had stood, ardyn lucis caelum now wept a single tear amidst the wavering dark, though reaching out with his free hand as though she had wept in his stead; hers was a strength he could only ever aspire to, seeking comfort, a still assurance that she was here, having already blessed him more than he deserved. ‘ ―seek you not the end, but the beginning, and be it far from this place…do not make me beg you, princess; eternity is already too short to absolve me of my sins. ’
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