Ever closer he drew, that dark lover of her's, like a plume of dust in the nighttime, the lull before the storm. He called for her endeavors, her rainy hopes and cloudy dreams; she in turn had nothing to impart but words of dread and grisly futures. From beneath half-lidded eyes she watched him, saw how the dim light caressed the taut lines of his athlete's body, saw how longingly the dark muzzle trailed over her body, like a wistful bird whose only barrier between freedom and captivity is thin latticework. She sought to do the same, to feel the thin, soft hairs of his sinewy mouth, the fine hairs of his chest like she had the morning the sun rose. Warmth spread over her cheeks like shame as she thought of that day, the longing to say words that went too long unsaid, to feel things that went too long unfelt; their eyes, both impossibly blue, glittered like the sulfur amulet he offered her in the thickening sunlight. And from that day her life was changed profoundly—and soon afterward their daughter was born, the first flower in her thawing heart. Would there be other children, laughing alloys of rain and doom? She pondered this briefly, but soon a darkness cloyed the affection in her eyes as she remembered the words of the lightning god, the sadness of a girl whose home was taken captive by the dead, the woman who saw a half a year without light and took death as a lover.

She tilted her head upward, slate lips brushing against the velvet of his dark ear briefly, ever carefully even through the longing expressed in the gesture. "There will be darkness," she whispered, her sweet voice strangled by fear and sorrow. Pulling back, her eyes, dark in the dim light, bore into his with an air of gravity. "He said our mountain walls wouldn't be enough to save us," Huyana told him, every word quickening in tempo, the hushed sound of her voice like a grave dirge, "he said we would be forced to sleep with our enemies, that we cannot fight this darkness." She paused, frustrated tears glittering in her wide eyes, but she refused to let them fall. "What will we do, Deimos? I've had enough of this darkness—how will we raise a family with all this misery, all this strangling darkness?" Her voice wavered, and she pushed her nose close enough to his body to feel his warm, to smell his delicious musk, and for a moment she was caught in the comfort of his immediacy.

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