Kaj & Kahlua

For a moment some deep, extraordinarily private part of the broken beast roared to see tears gathering in the gloss of Kahlua's eyes. How dare she cry, when it was his heart rendered irreparable? How dare she weep when she clearly felt no remorse for gleefully plucking chunks of his heart away week after week? It was preposterous. He felt as if every ligament, every layer of muscle, was methodically being stripped apart and torn into unrecognizable lumps of flesh and agony. She was like a surgeon, knowing every tweak and touch and pull that would shatter him until even the Gods could not piece him back together. Yet his heart was too thickly coated in gold, weak and malleable beneath the force of her tears, so no words came off the barbed tip of his tongue that soaked itself in poison and regret. A wounded lion, like all those years prior when he'd been but a mindless soldier with Ink his only accompanying friend. If only he could return to such a time, live only in that space he had created, free from the rending of his soul forcefully from the prison of his flesh as Kahlua so sought to do.

Her silence only damned her further, if not for withholding an answer, an explanation, then for her cowardice. She had sought him out, understood somewhere in her mind that such a thing could not be concealed with how closely they worked. It was into his part of the forest in which she traipsed. Was it to flaunt her new, budding body? Was she capable of such wickedness? Had he been fooled all along by her saccharine smiles and euphonious words? For it was his heart stabbed and bleeding upon the earth between them, her betrayal painted vividly before his eyes, and nothing could wish or word away the truth that was placed before him. He had been a complete, total, utter fool. For it was always beauty that killed the beast. Hadn't he known that all along?

A subtle song indiscernible previously to the beast's ears whipped into an infernal frenzy, harsh, discordant as it graced his listeners. Clearly another development he'd not been privy to. It clashed against his consciousness, ears twitching uncomfortably with the weird, pervasive sound. It blended with the sudden introduction of her voice, missing and silent for such long amounts of time. Kaj stared at her, dull and broken, heart still beating but the rest withering away until he couldn't fathom how he was still alive to hear her explanations. It was like a fairytale; interference of the gods, being the chosen mother to an offspring only partially mortal, a choice she supposedly could never have refused. Fanciful, a tale he once would never have believed. But that was before. Before the threshold, Tor, and Ink, Mirage and Destrier...

"We always have a choice," he spoke, as if from far away, like it was instinct to help her, to advise and chide her even when she had ruined everything he had built up concerning her. A mere whisper, half-hearted. The way his name slipped from her lips was like sin and sorrow, wrenching a rope wound round his heart until he shuddered like an automaton coming to life. Plans. A path for her to go along. And though he could not bear to look at her, the mere idea of a foal, of an innocent who had never asked for life nor had a choice in the matter when it came to their parents...perhaps Kaj could no longer stand to be near Kahlua, but the foal he would not let down. Not while it was within his power. For they would surely both suffer at the abandonment of the Sunshower, and Kaj knew well how Kahlua felt about foals.

"I will help you raise the child," he declared, firmly tying the noose round his own throat for the sake of a child who could always potentially despise him. A thankless job, one of thousands Kaj had taken upon his weary shoulders. "Seek Resplendence and Alysanne for any herbs, carry them with you in case you go into birth alone. You must eat heartier, be wary of too much exercise. That is all I can help you with, as of now." His words fell to a whisper at the end, the weight of the endeavor seeming to make his bones ache and skeletal frame creak. An impossible task, but one the father in him would not allow to die.