KAJ

the aurelight

Evening had slid upon the sky like a woozy, dreary painter upon a lopsided canvas. It had come slowly, leeching out the color from the sky like a devilish beast, and he recalled the hedonistic sins of the empress of the night and could not find a difference between she and his description. Kaj was a creation of sun and earth, fire and stone, but he could find a sort of elegance in the night around him. He had once delighted in letting the moonlight turn his skin to platinum, dancing through dappled patches reminiscent of sunlight. The Edge used to light up like a mimicry of fire, the mists aglow so bright that it seemed daylight had descended upon them once more. Kaj mused that the sun and the moon were rightfully similar, in their godly blood and lineage. If he could enjoy one, there was no harm in taking grasp of the memories he still had, the nights spent roaming beneath the stars, for he'd once been so alone that even the vastness of the world could not dissuade him from attempting to find companionship. 

He is still that alone, and he does not know why he attempts to convince himself otherwise. 

Though he remembers little of her now, faded gauze wrapped around a pretty face, Kaj recalls Kahlua's errant travels. He understands the pull in her bones, though it does not yank within his marrow as it surely had to in hers. He embraces it now, traveling beneath the satin of twilight, letting his legs carry him where wings would suffice. The earth is firm beneath his hooves, familiar though the path he treads is unknown. He was no traveler, no errant vagabond with a heart made for wandering. He was a soldier tethered to his rulers, he was a ruler tied to his herd, a father to his family. Upon his wings there may be wings, but the sky was the only foreign domain for him to escape to. He was not meant for this life of lonely pacing, and Kaj would never feel the need for it. 

But the sensation was enjoyable while Kaj was immersed in it, and with his thoughts on Cirrus and her unexpected return - her plea to join, to be a family, to be with him? - he found himself inevitably in the place where they had first met. The willow tree was as nondescript as any other, meaningless to all but he and the lass he'd met beneath its boughs. But it was familiar, and he turned away from it, the memories it inspired and the changed woman that paralleled the ghost in his head. Instead he turned his face to the stars, as bright as miniature suns but unwilling to impart their warmth upon him. Void, heartless, brilliant. He strained to be like them, but was left wanting. Unchanged. Even in all his efforts he was weak and malleable, pushed around by the pretty faces surrounding him as they cheerfully crushed his heart with hands he'd only dreamed of chastely kissing. 

Kaj turned his head to face the waters, feeling an itch below his skin, a desire to wash away the wraithlike memories haunting the gaps in his head. And he found her, angelic and solitary, submersed in the twilight waters like a silver monument to the night's beauty. They stood on opposite shores, her face familiar as it submitted itself at an angle beneath his gaze. The Czar let his title slide loose from his shoulders, aware that Megaera was the Sultana, further aware that this grove of tranquility did not need such pervasive, somber subjects as shifting powers and loss of purpose. 

The brute stepped to the edge of the water, sliding in only to his knees, hoping to draw her attention from whatever had so captivated her. "Sohalia," he rumbled quietly, only loud enough to reach her ears, loathe to disturb the quiet of the evening. Though the sound of insects and various animals remained they too were sparse with the winter evening, but the chill of the water would not keep him from her company. Not when he felt as if he knew her deeply, in this moment. Even if he was merely deluding himself. "May I join you?"

KAJ

the aurelight

He's loathe to ripple the waters around her, for she has achieved a level of stillness that turns the pond into glass, reflecting the stars and pregnant moon overhead. She reflected it as well, seeming to absorb the gossamer threads of moonlight within her skin. He was the sun that revolved around her, and he mused that perhaps they would be given this one night to reunite. This was what fables were made of, and he sighed softly into the chill of the air. Oh how the sun loved the moon, he recited quietly to himself as he watched her beautiful eyes alight upon him. Her rasping voice was filled with a deep desperation that Kaj wanted to drink from, drown his sorrows in the same liquor she imbued herself with. He could sense it in her, scent it like death that clung to her skin, this kindred agony they shared. 

Obligingly the gold stepped into the pool, the Transcended and the Aurelight bathing beneath the cool distant light of the stars. His wings moved to float atop the water, mimicking her pose as he waded deeper, left inevitably taller in his looming height but as equal as he could make them. His hooves sank into the soft, forgiving silt at the bottom of the pond, but he let his own body still instead of fighting the way he sank into the earth. His eyes were only for Sohalia, for the shadows he found in her blue gaze, and let his own defenses melt away beneath the plaintive stare of hers. Her soft, throaty confession was met with a sad smile, knowing there was no need to shield himself from her now. They were just two lonely souls in a lake, trying to find an anchor to cling to for a few hours more. 

"But sometimes it's better to not be alone," he pointed out, voice soft and rumbling like comforting distant thunder. She had begged him to join her, after all. She had not simply granted her permission, she had said please. It was as clear a sign as any that she did not want to suffer through whatever this was alone. Kaj tentatively offered his muzzle to the pale woman, in case she wanted something physical, something platonic and unquestionably affectionate to ground herself with. There need not be any strings or requirements attached to it, and Kaj would not admit to himself that maybe he needed it to. 

KAJ

the aurelight

Her desperation seemed like a visceral thing, like seaweed grasping at his ankles and tugging him helplessly forward. Everything about her seemed to reach out and tangle itself into him, pulling him inward, falling hopelessly into the chasm of her familiar sorrow. Kaj did not attempt to slow his descent into her realm of numbness, instead feeling a free-falling sort of relief as the water lapped at his belly and cooled the undersides of his wings. He did not have to pretend to be whole here, try and save face and pride before his people and those he had willfully erased from his memories. There was nothing to taint the waters between he and Sohalia, and it felt like he was pulling back countless layers that had been laying heavy on his body and soul just by standing in her presence. 

Her smile was a tentative, broken thing, and Kaj's echoed it. There was something both sharp and intrinsically sad in the way their lips tried fruitlessly to lift, that even here in this place where they did not have to kid each other they still attempted to be normal. To prove - maybe to themselves - that they still had the strength to deal with all of this. He couldn't hold it against her, not when his own face was attempting the same expression. It didn't make the burden any easier to bear, but it also seemed to speak volumes. 

"I'm glad I found you," he admitted quietly, trying to find her eyes. He needed to know that she was here with him, that she wasn't some conjured dream, some last bid attempt at dealing with the eternal heartbreak that even his self-imposed amnesia could not seem to fix. He was glad that she had managed to shatter his shambling wanderings, because the world had started to seem too large, feeling like it was crushing him beneath the weight of its endless skies. A claustrophobia inspired by the expansiveness of the world, and the fact that even with how large Helovia was, he had still been alone in his travels. 

Her velvet lips caressed his in the briefest of kisses, only to return, firmer and less hesitant. Kaj's eyes slid shut, letting his world narrow to the warmth of her breath and the touch of her skin for a moment. A pinprick of light in the darkness, until he dared to open his eyes and see her illuminated beneath the moon once more. 

"Stay," she begged him. Always, he wanted to say, a vow he'd never been allowed to make. Until you ask me to leave, he hoped to whisper, except that request had always come in actions instead of words in his past. Instead he pressed their bare foreheads together, sharing her breaths, because he had nothing to promise her. He had nothing left to give, and he could not even assure something as insignificant as time. "Okay," he murmured instead, with nothing else to say and no other way to say it. And he stepped forward and let his wet wings come up to shield her from this cruel world, allowing the expanse of his back for their whips to caress instead of subjecting her to it. He could hold out a little longer, if it meant giving her the safe haven she clearly sought in him. And maybe all this time his greatest flaw had been selflessness. 

KAJ

the aurelight

Kaj had loved a lot in his life. He had handed his heart to countless souls, shy and sincere in his affections. He had loved them simply, chastely, but profoundly. He would have spent the span of the mortal life he'd been granted at their sides, devoting himself to their happiness, if only they had deigned to let him. He had never hungered for more. He had never dared to cross the line into anything as primal and possessive as this. It had seemed like a stain upon their virtues to see them in such a light too soon, to reduce them to mere objects when they were so much more in his eyes. Kaj loved so strongly that he did not need lust to try and fill in a gap that did not exist. And maybe he did not love Sohalia, but love had cheated and defiled him, and he would not taint her with that impurity. He would not force the ghosts of the women he'd loved upon her visage, to taunt and grate upon him in this perfect moment. He would not force her to live up to a standard he considered above himself, for even now he could not condemn the ones he'd loved for their treatment of him. 

He allowed himself this moment, allowed himself the touch of her skin and the trembling of her heart that echoed the bruised organ in his own chest. The tears burned at his eyes but never came, because he was so starved of touch that he did not know if he would be able to pull away when morning came. He'd lived so many years shunned and removed from something as simple as the touch of her forehead, and he drank her in like an alcoholic breaking his four year dry spell. He wanted to clasp her to him, wanted to prove that he was capable of taking this pain away from her. He wanted to drag her burden upon his own shoulders, because it made him feel for a moment like he had a purpose. But she lifted her wings and denied him, and his soul cried out in confusion. He did not know how else to exist. He did not know how to live for himself, and here she was asking it of him. 

She turned the mirror upon him and made him gaze into the face of his demons, and the only way he could was to draw upon the strength her own broken fortitude supplied him. Maybe he did not need to shield and defend her in order to find purpose. Maybe this, just this, would be enough. Existing, chasing away the cold and the pain together, as equals. 

Kaj had never experienced this kind of equality before, so willing to do whatever it took for the sake of love that he'd never been awarded. And yet she taught him in every small movement and unspoken word, a proficient and patient teacher, unaware of the deliverance she was granting him. Maybe he did not love her romantically, permanently. But he loved her, at least, for that. 

So he whispered "okay" and let his wings fall away, let her bite along his crest and draw forth from him an emotion and drive he had never experienced. And he let it fester in his chest, feeling like a poison being sucked free of his veins, and he fell into her. 

Oh, for the sun loved the moon...

- - -

Daylight came, though the chill could not be erased by its faint rays of warmth. And yet even as his frame shivered, Kaj felt as though his chest was warmed and less hollow than he had been before. Like maybe the numbness had receded, if only for the moment. He awaited her quietly, feeling suddenly too large for her small, beautiful frame as it stood beside him. He felt the same desire he always did, as if he sought to build a house of cherry wood with calloused hands, to braid roses into her hair and sweep the misery from her shoulders with an errant gesture. He did not love her, but he cared for her the way he did for all others. He wanted to find a quiet place for her to find her peace, whether she wanted him part of it or not. He was sorrowful in the face of her pain, because he knew it so intimately. 

And he would never wish it upon her.

Her softly professed fear gentled the blue of his eyes, and he brushed his muzzle gently behind her ear in a parting gesture. "I am too," he confessed quietly. "But we can't know if tomorrow will be better unless we move towards it." There was no overt optimism to his tone, in fact one that was rather defeated seemed to lace across the words. Each step hurt, each breath burned, but he had to execute them if only to cling to the hope that in the next second, minute, hour...things would be better. The pain would ease. It had eased with Sohalia, in the starlit pond, and so he knew it to be a truthful statement. "If you ever need me, if only for a moment...you need only find me," was tentatively whispered, as if afraid she would reject his offer, the tentative friendship he proffered. The possibility of finding solace in someone as broken as she, as they had last night - though perhaps not in the same way. 

But maybe they would walk away from this a little better. A little farther down the path to healing the wounds they still carried with them.