i missed your skin when you were east

“Lead Thief? Congratulations.” I heard him speak to me, ears flickering and heart pounding with a sense that he was covering something. Perhaps that reaction should have been something I expected, but like always when it came to Tembovu, it was one of the last things I expected. I knew how bad it sounded. I knew how painful it would seem to him, to learn that perhaps I had used him for intel for the Basin, but that’s not what it was. That’s not what this feeling was. It was something unlike anything else I had ever known, and likely would ever know again. I shifted my weight, eyes dancing across his face and striped body, a heavy sigh finding its way past my lips.

My heart pounded with a pain that wasn’t anything like what I knew from our last interaction. It wasn’t that pain of jealousy and regret that I knew I had caused him as well prior to his mishap with that gray mare’s child. It was different now, a full weight pressing down like thousands of spiked boulders into my heart. I felt numb, aside from that pain. Unsure of how to continue on. “I know how it sounds. If you would trust me like you did when we first met, you would know that I would never use you for anything.” I spoke to him, tone still stern in hoping he would trust me on this.

I felt the silence begin to grow. I contemplated on speaking but as I went to open my mouth, his words filled the air. “I don’t think I could ever leave you, Rex.” My eyes fell to the ground, knowing that I could never leave him either but silently knowing that his answer wasn’t the one I was looking for. I flickered my ears in uncertainty as my blue eyes scanned the ground briefly trying to figure out just how to even respond to that. I didn’t want to give him false hope and cause more hurt, but the torment we caused each other with this affair was enough that I couldn’t seem to bear it anymore.

We weren’t perfect, and I like to think that we were learning it slowly over every dramatic encounter we endured with one another. We showed our resilience, our perseverance. I remembered the pain in his eyes as I mistook him for Calstron, the pain in his words as he told me that Nyx’s child might be his, the feeling of his blue eyes boring holes into my skin as I threw myself recklessly at these Rift Gods. The pain I had caused him without realizing it every step of the way when all he had wanted was to be a gentleman. To be mine.

His gruff voice filled the air once more as I stood, blindly staring at him. Silently agreeing with how much we had heart each other, and how he would take it from this. I felt my head bob to him, nodding in a quiet agreeance. However, he paused until he spoke of all the things I found to be flaws. Beauty comes with great consequences, ones that I couldn’t handle right. My light came from such a dark past that it was hard to even see the end of the tunnel anymore. My tenderness that had grown from horrible previous encounters. He told me that he hoped I recognized them and I nodded briefly. How they made him a better man, I didn’t know. “I will take your compassion, your pride, and your spirit with me. I want you to know that if it weren’t for meeting you in the Threshold when you got yourself stuck in that tree, that I would have no idea what real love felt like.” My voice was soft and I offered him a weak smile with it, speaking of the tree incident when he first arrived.

Yet when he spoke again, it was the answer I was looking for, but I felt my heart shift in a million different places. I felt a fire start within me, it began to vindicate me of my our problems. It grew ablaze and I watched as the world turned in slow motion before my eyes. The thought of him thinking that he wasn’t the man to take my heart felt like ripping me in two. I wanted to scream at him, to tell him that where he thought these issues were his fault were all wrong. I wanted to tell him that he was the only one I had ever truly felt the words love for. The only one that I could see growing old with. The only one I could see bearing children to – and yet here I was bearing anothers child. I obviously learned nothing from being with Tembovu, and for that I deserved to suffer for it.

Blue eyes sharply stuck to the skull of the Elephant. Every encounter we had both been at flashing before my eyes, the good and the bad. “That’s where we differ, Tembovu. I want you to take my love. But my love is tainted. It’s everything in all the wrong places. I want you to have everything you deserve, everything I’m not. A man so noble and gentle deserves a creature that can complement that, not be the polar opposite. You are not the man for me because I don’t deserve you” The words escaped me like a flood. My face grew hot and I withdrew from him, stepping back briefly with no control over my notions. “You deserve the world. I wish I could have been the one to give it to you.”

I lifted my head now, watching him briefly. “I don’t know where our lives will take us now, but I hope that we can at least see each other now and then. I hope you find a mate that can treat you like Mara had, have children to grow old with like Faxr could have.” I breathed their names with a release. I felt like I was letting go, but I wasn’t prepared. Not yet. “In the meantime, I’ll stick to proving myself back home. I only hope to ever be as successful as you, even with expecting –” I cut myself off then, blue eyes watching him as I felt the fire grow within my body, sparking and electrifying.

I turned from him, shutting my eyes hard against my heated face. “I – I don’t know what’s happening.” I whispered, but loud enough above the buzz of the bells that seemed to disappear in the entire event that unfolded around us. I lowered my head, hovering it above the ground where my golden horn fell perpendicular to the sky. The heat grew and my horn sparked and cracked with electricity and fire briefly until something in my body prompted me to release the feeling I had gathered. I let out a sharp puff of air, opening my eyes to see the wonder of my sparking horn. I was terrified, I thought I was going to burst. I felt the electricity within me, the heat burning on my face, until finally –

BANG

I watched, jaw falling open, as the feeling escaped my body. It took off like a rocket to the sky, red and golds resembling fire flying up into the air. Then, another bang. Showers of red and gold sprinkled down over the gathering, blue eyes staring in fright over what had just happened. I turned to look at the Elephant King, speechlessly wondering if he saw it too.