𝗰𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱，for @azraehl.
the threshold between the courts of night and day. war camp. dusk, a month before under the mountain.
𝘁𝘆𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 go easily into his grief. at first, everything and nothing was sticky with its hue —— all those leagues of silent, anguished grey. his mind’s eye is a fractured triptych : his mother, folded at the waist, ashen hair hanging lank at the sides of her sallow face ; the pegasus, lurching beneath him, and the spray of her ichor on his face ; and, most damnably, the inky seraph, cleaving the sky to halves in his trajectory to break tyrian’s fall. azrael. the gasp that fled his throat took that name for shape, then, as they veered to earth like meteors.
the hiss that parts tyrian’s lips now is reedy and snared ; it rattles against his teeth as he tries in vain to trap it. only then does he dip his chin to the notch between his clavicles and consider the gash, the furrow that meanders from shoulder to flank in perfect mimicry of the tear that put his mare to death. the skin, though puckered and rash-red, no longer weeps —— the healers salved and placated it as best they could, coaxing it with words of old and daubing onto it their best balms and poultices. flayed like a stag brought down onto an embalming table, he laid on the cot for a day and a night, clinging to his body as a newborn to its mother. no longer within, yet fearful that to return is to push something monstrous out. there’s nothing for it, he said, at last, when the wound-scar remained stunted and would not yield. it shall be a reminder always.
the press of him against his wards is as staggering as it is natural : outside, the sun is veering to earth also. before long, the moon will assume her consort's mantle —— he wonders if they will touch, if even in passing. a zephyr, small and childlike, curls against his ear and whispers, he is here. wretchedly, a memory lashes at tyrian’s back like the whip of a wyvern’s cutlass tail : he is half-crazed again, mouthing against the column of his throat to feel the motion of each swallow, each shuddering gasp, each strike of his pulse. he is wreathing his hand into that black-opal hair again, furling and unfurling his fingers to feel the tresses fan out on his palm like tendrils of smoke. it shall be a reminder always. as surely as the stars know distance, as one constellation grieves the uncrossable chasm that flanks the next. such is the interim between day and night, their deathless rupture, their lifeless rapture, a haunting that can never be soothed. and it was just a little like holding death to his chest, too, but if death is close then so is life, and they are nothing if not an unbreakable conflation of both.
unfurling now, tyrian laughs, low and pleased. the sound pours from his maw like nectar from an overturned chalice, slow to come into its own. ‘ azrael. ’
prguitarman
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
kianamaiart
pixelskylines
germansingergirl
2087
