((A/N: I hope some of you that used to read this fic have found me here... I cannot log into my old user account, and Support hasn't gotten back to me on it in a long time. I decided to painstakingly repost each chapter and the new ones I've written under this account. I've made some improvements here and there as I went, too! Please enjoy.))
"Sarah..."
He sighed her name, and the reverberation of his despair cast a misty chill over the dying land. He knew she still heard him, always there, singing songs in her mind.
"Everything I've done, I've done for you."
"Saraaaahhhh..."
He wondered if she were there, touching the mirror as he had so often seen her do... yes, he still went Aboveground to watch her from time to time, just to catch a glimpse of her. He watched her in his crystals when the magics were good, but he had grown so weary.
"How you've turned my world, you precious thing."
How deeply humiliating that a mortal girl could reduce him to this. How absurd, to have offered everything only to have... nothing...
'I move the stars for no one.'
He wanted her here, He wanted her to never return. He wanted her as his Queen, sitting becrowned beside him, sitting straight up with her lovely pink lips parted slightly in a smile, perhaps entertained by a frolicking goblin. He wanted her too as his slave, degraded, sitting at his feet and begging with her large doe eyes, pleading, completely under his control. He wanted her to live with him, and to die without him. He wanted... he wanted...
"Sarah!" He whisper-cried in desperation, the name spilling from him as a venomous curse and a reverent prayer at once.
How she had grown. It was so short a time here... time ran differently than in the Above. He begun to worry, because less and less would she stand at her mirror now, and no "I wish" had danced off of her lips in years of her time. Less and less would she stare into the depths of her reflection, warm in the knowledge that she knew it's secrets. Less and less would she turn and stop at the sound of his wings flicking, slicing through wintry ait like so many feathered blades. He was frightened. She was forgetting, and he had never needed her so desperately.
She was becoming a woman, now, and it was little more than a child he had loved before. A child's fantasies he had bent before. Sometimes when she did stop, when she sensed him, when she heard the snick of his wings, he could see the hope and regret in her eyes. He wondered, perhaps, if his Sarah would come to him. Come, before she forgot completely...
He breathed deep, feeling the now-familiar stabbing sensation within his breast that made it difficult to breathe. Oh, Gods, it was getting worse by the day!
Painfully, he gathered up a crystal, and leaned back to gaze into it. Surely and thankfully, there she was, standing in the mirror and thinking of him even as he thought of her. It had been so long since the last time she looked, who knew when she might look again? Who knew how weak he might be when the time came? Waiting was over... it had to be now. Gathering what strength he had left, he pushed out at her, giving it everything he had left. He spoke her name, commanding, pleading.
"Oh, Sarah..."
How absurd it was to desire something so much. How absurd to offer everything... how absurd... how absurd that he should be reduced to this.
Before everything went black, he thought, or perhaps imagined, that she spoke his name in return.