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i am the vanguard of your destruction
It trembled.
His pulse was a shiver going through aching veins—just a flutter forcing blood around. Some heat slipping just beneath his skin, trying to keep a glacier warm.
But they just don't melt, not even with her life pressed against his back. And he wondered, if there was fire burning deep in the bedrock, a roaring furnace somewhere below a hundred feet of ice and a hundred feet of stone. He had a heart, because he could feel it beating (trembling). He had a heart, but what if it was empty? Shriveled up, dead and black? What if he was what he had been called—Frostheart? Maybe it had died in the long winter which had reigned in his soul, frostbitten beyond all recognition—beyond all salvation.
(All hope—)
Could you fill a cold, dead thing up with life and have it be the same as when it had truly lived? (Cold, wild nights under distant stars, a fire in his soul, easy laughter in his throat.) Or was it once dead, always dead? (All those stars reflected in his bluer eyes.)
Their sky was breathing dawn-air, a chill hanging in the shadows like the stubborn winter, and with a warm body pressed against his back and that foreign sky easing up a little above him—
He whispered to his heart, 'Isir is dead'.
And he could make that list a whole lot longer. There were many things he had not forgiven himself for.
“Do you want to be without him?” Mauja's eyes closed. He almost seemed peaceful, bathed in the gentle starlight and dappled with shadows from the evergreen trees. The lines and planes of his face were smooth, his forelock strewn with haphazard elegance against the cold ground. He could've been asleep—could've fallen into some witch's spell and would sleep (a nightmare) for a hundred years, until some unfortunate soul found him and kissed him, freeing him from his tomb of ice.
Her voice lingered like a memory in his mind, a jumbled mess asking all the right questions but supplying no answers. And, deeper, as his tired heart began to remember something of strength, he wanted to shake it off—say, enough about me, what about you?. Turn away from the messy spikes going through his heart, turn a blind eye. Weren't they merely house decoration, anyway, with how long they had been buried in there? He was used to them.
But try running with a heart full of sharp shards.
It doesn't work very well.
"He was charming," Mauja said after a moment. He still felt numb in a way that had nothing to do with lying on his side on snow. "He was supremely confident, but cautious, unwilling to come off as a narcissistic asshole. And somehow, he commanded loyalty." Strange, to think that that driven, blood-thirsty King had been him—that these two vastly different souls had inhabited the same body. (And on the tail end of that, Gods, I was so stupid, whispered with a groan and swallowed with shame, guilt.) "He was easy, always in control, always so sure, steadfast like a mountain—no doubts, no quarter given, no mercy, just an iron sword going straight for your heart," he was whispering now, summoning the ghost of himself, "but ultimately, he was a fucking idiot."
Mauja's eyelids had gone from peacefully closed to a littler tighter, a little tauter. It was a rowdy ghost lost somewhere, still vindictive, still bitter, full of fury. "He was balanced enough, but at his core, he was hateful, and arrogant. He wasn't a brute who relished violence, but he was disciplined, skillful, detached..." His eyes opened again; one staring at snow, the other at the sky. "When there is peace, I am restless. When I am not drowning in duty—a role—I am drowning in anxiety and frustration. It's like I don't know how to exist without an ulterior motive and something to hate."
And he laughed, bitterly.
[ @Roskuld ]
His pulse was a shiver going through aching veins—just a flutter forcing blood around. Some heat slipping just beneath his skin, trying to keep a glacier warm.
But they just don't melt, not even with her life pressed against his back. And he wondered, if there was fire burning deep in the bedrock, a roaring furnace somewhere below a hundred feet of ice and a hundred feet of stone. He had a heart, because he could feel it beating (trembling). He had a heart, but what if it was empty? Shriveled up, dead and black? What if he was what he had been called—Frostheart? Maybe it had died in the long winter which had reigned in his soul, frostbitten beyond all recognition—beyond all salvation.
(All hope—)
Could you fill a cold, dead thing up with life and have it be the same as when it had truly lived? (Cold, wild nights under distant stars, a fire in his soul, easy laughter in his throat.) Or was it once dead, always dead? (All those stars reflected in his bluer eyes.)
Their sky was breathing dawn-air, a chill hanging in the shadows like the stubborn winter, and with a warm body pressed against his back and that foreign sky easing up a little above him—
He whispered to his heart, 'Isir is dead'.
And he could make that list a whole lot longer. There were many things he had not forgiven himself for.
“Do you want to be without him?” Mauja's eyes closed. He almost seemed peaceful, bathed in the gentle starlight and dappled with shadows from the evergreen trees. The lines and planes of his face were smooth, his forelock strewn with haphazard elegance against the cold ground. He could've been asleep—could've fallen into some witch's spell and would sleep (a nightmare) for a hundred years, until some unfortunate soul found him and kissed him, freeing him from his tomb of ice.
Her voice lingered like a memory in his mind, a jumbled mess asking all the right questions but supplying no answers. And, deeper, as his tired heart began to remember something of strength, he wanted to shake it off—say, enough about me, what about you?. Turn away from the messy spikes going through his heart, turn a blind eye. Weren't they merely house decoration, anyway, with how long they had been buried in there? He was used to them.
But try running with a heart full of sharp shards.
It doesn't work very well.
"He was charming," Mauja said after a moment. He still felt numb in a way that had nothing to do with lying on his side on snow. "He was supremely confident, but cautious, unwilling to come off as a narcissistic asshole. And somehow, he commanded loyalty." Strange, to think that that driven, blood-thirsty King had been him—that these two vastly different souls had inhabited the same body. (And on the tail end of that, Gods, I was so stupid, whispered with a groan and swallowed with shame, guilt.) "He was easy, always in control, always so sure, steadfast like a mountain—no doubts, no quarter given, no mercy, just an iron sword going straight for your heart," he was whispering now, summoning the ghost of himself, "but ultimately, he was a fucking idiot."
Mauja's eyelids had gone from peacefully closed to a littler tighter, a little tauter. It was a rowdy ghost lost somewhere, still vindictive, still bitter, full of fury. "He was balanced enough, but at his core, he was hateful, and arrogant. He wasn't a brute who relished violence, but he was disciplined, skillful, detached..." His eyes opened again; one staring at snow, the other at the sky. "When there is peace, I am restless. When I am not drowning in duty—a role—I am drowning in anxiety and frustration. It's like I don't know how to exist without an ulterior motive and something to hate."
And he laughed, bitterly.
[ @Roskuld ]
