Alarkling + tears
There were tears those first few decades, lots of them. The Darkling felt them as a river, running through the palace.
Alina cried as she mourned her life from Before — things had been simpler when she hadn’t been Tsarista of a country at war, when her partner hadn’t been a Tsar she hated as much as craved, when the hunger for power hadn’t been carving out its place inside her bones. And when she’d nearly finished adjusting, she had to mourn her friends as they died — one, by one, by one, by one.
There were fights as they worked out what balance truly meant. Learning to take from the other the power they needed — that was easy. Learning to give? That was something else entirely.
By the time Alina had stopped crying, they had begun to unravel the mystery. By the time their fights more frequently ended in bed than in Alina disappearing for a season, the specifics were hammered out.
Merzost is a tricky thing, and the Fold its own separate beast. Between the two of them, though, his hands resting on her hips as she called on his power — and called and called and called, him a bottomless reservoir and her the full destructive force of the sun — between the two of them, the Fold shrank, shriveled, disappeared.
They stood on the hilltop, gazing at a desert visible for the first time in generations. Abandoned skiffs lined the flats beside the ruins of what had been there centuries before. It was almost possible, if the Darkling looked back on his whole eon of life, to imagine what might be there a hundred years hence.
He was not surprised to see tears falling from his Tsarista’s eyes as she stared over what had been the Fold. He was, though, taken aback at what he found trapped in the ink of his own lashes: a single teardrop, shining like a star.
