Desreal: my stelios ;

She hears him, his voice filtering through the shadows of the wood, and at first she thinks she dreams it; in the flickering half-light of dawn, after the long night and the phantoms and the darkness and the billowing plume of pain that erupted ceaselessly upon her shoulder, his voice comes as a shard of light through the thick pitch of night, and she clings to it, sprawled awkwardly on the cold ground where she had fallen. She hears him, and she thinks him a dream – and part of her is relieved, and grateful, when he does not appear before her, to see her like this: bent, and broken, and betraying; she thinks she can never go back, for the shame of it, and for the blood that had stiffened in her hide.

She remembers him, the silver Wraith that called her, and touched her, and took from her; she had only ever felt his teeth, and his breath at a head’s length, but it was enough to be burned into her mind with horror and confusion and the disgust of treachery that had bent her heart to him, swathed in magic: were she not a traitor, to be bend to the will of a shard? She tightens against the wind, and the snow that begged at the edge of it, and thinks again of the ghost of his voice; she aches in it, and revels in it, and as her scar burns deeper into her flesh and soul, Accendare – Dragonet, yet still so callow, still so naļve – how can he stand to see her, like this? Once so alive, and quick-minded and silver-tongued: she lies there in the hollow of her own iniquity, and waits for the shadows to unfold on her shame –

And Stelios comes before her, stuttered in steps and the choked sound of her heart stopping as he emerges from the trees scratched and scraped and – to her – utterly ethereal; he calls her again, entirely unlike the way the Wraith has called to her, and for a moment she struggles to get to her feet (and she knows not yet it if were to go to him, or to flee), and fails in her exhaustion: she is open before him, flayed alive, and she cannot meet his eyes. “Stelios…” She does not answer him yet; she cannot, for the shame, and the pain, and the look she knows will be burning in his eyes, that she had not fought harder.

I should tell you. Oh, I should tell you.

The wind blows, and she flickers with it – brighter and paler, her flame and her flesh strengthened and guttered by it, and eventually – with their breaths, and the growing time, and the silence that stretched between them – she lifts her eyes to him, to see him, and to see herself reflected in the glowing silver of him. What she sees there – powerful, and unexpected – surprises her; as do the first words she speaks since his name, in the night: “You’re leaving.”

She swallows the flat and toneless words bitterly, and with a sudden harsh laugh as she feels their worlds crumbling; he was going, and now; now, when her scar glittered fresh upon her shoulder, now, when –

Now, or never.

She rises finally, and silently: she cannot stop looking into his eyes, their depths, their texture, and what flared behind them; she wonders what flames behind her own, newly snarled in the Shard’s roaring winds and the Wraith’s vile violation. She wavers upon her feet, weak and broken but beating and burning, and steps towards him – slowly, deliberately, and with her old determination rising in the shattered wreck of her face. Truly, she thinks – truly, she begins, and thinks no more, as she breathes away their fear and touches him; she knows his Shard twists within him as her scar blazes upon her skin, and it does not matter. Oh Stelios, you give me strength/, she thinks and then – yes, even with the blood on her skin, rippling from the memory of the Wraith’s depravation and the horror of what she had given, and even in the face of his departure – she smiles, sadly, and flensed, she finally tells him.

“He took me, Stelios. He called me, and in my stupidity, my ignorance, I came; he went into my mind, and stole my innocence, with words and magic and half-truth. He made me love him, as I love you,” and here her voice falters, and her heart breaks, now, with nothing to lose “and he sullied me, bewitched my mind and took my blood. I am his, for now” as I am now not yours “until…” She gasps, and touches him again, thrusting her head beneath her jaw and feeling his blood pulse beneath her skin, and now she had never been more truthful, never more alive “ – until I kill him, and take his shard, and destroy it. I will, for you. I swear it.” And swear it she did, to his skin, to his shard, to the love that she felt for him, and for the throne he threw at his feet; oh god, do I love you, she thinks with a sob, echoed in the hitch in her breathing and the tears that she hides against him, and never more certain of anything in her life;

“Don’t go,” she whispers, but she knows she cannot stop him.

Now, at the end of all things, as the shadows shortened and the new spring sun rose upon two horses broken and bloodied and soon to be torn apart; Accendare had always been afflicted with the most terrible sort of inconvenience.