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The gift he was giving her was a marvelous one. Clouds swooped beneath her hooves, lifting her into the sky, to nirvana or Valhalla or gods knew where—but it was his lips against the roughness of her cheek that took the air from her lungs. She couldn’t understand it—this tender forgiveness that he offered unjealously, kindly meant. It baffled her that there remained some shred of affection for his failed Executioner—his lax and deplorable lady, the mother of children allowed to wander away, lost in oblivion for all she knew. The sky floated around the shadowmere, wondrous and grand; she stepped from the insubstance of cloudwork onto a solid spire of rock, floating amongst the heavens, and her Dauntless lead her to a place swathed with fragrant petals.

It was too gorgeous for Circe to bear. Amongst all these fine things of purity—especially the gentle love Archibald insisted on offering—she felt even lower than before, a mongrel, her fluttering heart fragile in its hope and façade of courage. She leaned into his shade as he groomed her; she closed her eyes and sighed, allowing herself to bask in his touch for some moments, before lifting her lips to his broad chest and reciprocating the gesture. The wind around her smelled sweet, and blew like a kiss against her neck; the confusion that rattled the shadowmere was tempered somewhat by it, her nerves calmed, her wits slightly less rattled than before.

His shadow was patient, silent; it did nothing to force her thoughts into words that she dreaded, merely coaxing her form her shell, constructing bridges stone by stone, brick by brick, that crossed the chasm surrounding her heart. She took a breath, the wind fluttering down her throat; she sighed it out, then took another, then another, before she could finally find some shred of courage to begin asking questions that frightened her with their implications. “Tell me....about our boys,” she murmured against him, as her teeth and lips continued to work against his hide. He had assuaged her need to hear of their safety; it was all she knew about the boys she had borne in a bloodied day of sunlit rain. “Abraham..? Reginald..? What…” she paused for a second, “You say Abraham has a dragon…?" It was a disgusting thing to slip passed her lips—this thing that indicated her ignorance to the whereabouts of her offspring, the disconnection so profound that left her children total strangers to her side. She could have melted from the shame of it; she could feel shards of her soul sparking out of control, threatening to burst, to scatter from her skin and hair in fright and sickened shame.

Archibald’s shadow was there, however; it was deep, and patient, silent. It bound her to earth, and soothed her into something mortal, and real. “How…have you been faring, Archibald?”



@[Archibald]
speaking