i am the vanguard of your destruction

Truth was difficult. Truth was unlearning twelve years of bad habits and shot-down, broken and burnt dreams. Truth was listening to the erratic spikes of pain pouring from his pulse.

Truth was accepting that he was lost: in this world, in his past, in himself. Truth was accepting that which he had forced upon her by the Rotunda: I do not exist. Truth was forcing it upon her again, until she, too, would accept it and understand it, that—

(“Your heart’s still beating.”)

It wasn't even stampeding through his chest anymore; it was just pulsing a little, struggling weakly against the black tide of darkness scourging his soul. A wounded thing struggling in the jaws of its inevitable fate—a ceaseless, endless struggle, for he would never find rest.

A curse he had brought upon himself. A curse wrapped in sweet promises (made by no one) and dreams and shiny silver gift-wrap papers, and riding high on the idea of a purpose he'd stumbled headfirst into. Swallowed it. Sink, bait, hook, line. Heart and soul, he was owned, and the only thing he saw when he stared ahead was darkness. Limitless, fathomless, infinite. A guardian, he had thought, but of what? He'd fought all his wars on the wrong side.

A ghost, he thought now, one blue eye staring vacantly up. It seemed an eternity ago that Sarazheha had looked at him and said Honesty, brother. And where had that honesty gotten him?

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. What was the meaning of peace? Why did he exist at all? Had he ever been anything but this, a broken vessel aspiring for things it could not be?

“I know,” she said.

Twelve years of untruth. Twelve years of chasing ghosts and sealing up his heart. Twelve years of pretense. Twelve years (—I have a heart)—

He knew that he had a heart. It was raw and rugged, had scratched his chest until it bled from within, and now it had given up. His heart wasn't the problem, not anymore, not compared to that wave of darkness rising higher and higher above his head (—like a noose, tightening). The problem was that the years had scraped away and scraped away and scraped away until the thick walls around his heart were bloodstained with the splatters of his dying heart, and the weight of the world had snapped the framework around his mind. Mauja the Frostheart—Bane of the Plague—had died, but without that persona, without those well-known habits and ways of speaking, thinking, acting, interacting, Mauja the What The Fuck Am I had no idea how to exist.

And perhaps that was why he gravitated towards familiar things—bitterness and hate, anger and violence. Grief and shame and guilt.

She laid down next to him.

She, who had found a myriad pieces of him throughout the years, and put them together; but what did she see?

What moved her to lay next to him? What moved her to remain with him? What did he give her?

What had caused so many to follow him, so blindly, so willingly? What had inspired, ensnared, enchanted? Wherever he went—and yet she was the only one here, now. She was the warmth against his back, the weight across his neck, pushing the fragments of his heart a little closer to one another, so the blood didn't have quite such a way to fall.

She was life. (He was death.)
She was hope. (He was defeat.)

He was tired beyond the point of feeling: he was numb, as if the snow had worked its way through his fur into his skin, settled like frost in his marrow. "Once," he began to say, his voice too level, too calm, too dead, "there was a man known as Mauja the Frostheart. He was King of the World's Edge half a lifetime ago. His kingdom was built upon arrogance, his vision steeped in blood, and his story built upon much the same. He was three years old."

Because Mauja had been six—but that Mauja had not existed until that night when he was three and it was just a mess how he'd come to become what he'd been.

"He began to die three years later. A year after that, he was all but destroyed—and yet he remains, like a skin I can't slough off."

Weakly, his head rose, one blue eye swirling to focus on Roskuld. What had he done to deserve her? (What had he done to miss out on how to share?) How much did he know of her; how little did she know of him? "Without him, I do not know how to be," he finally whispered, an edge of fear in his voice; an edge of white around his eyes. His breath smoked into the still-cold air, and his head fell back down into the snow.

A perfect grave for the one who is frozen.

[ I'm a scrub and I literally have no idea what I just wrote @Roskuld ]