The sequel to Passion.
Disclaimer: I hardly own these characters.
The Pseudonym of Partnership
The reflective surface of a frozen lake shone with filtered moonlight, sparkling where the ice was thin, an illusion that the ice was merely water. A black light. The demon picked his way across the ice, weaving through the trees that broke through the frost to reach for the star-strung sky. In his clawed fingers, he carried a large book wrapped tightly in protective oilcloth.
If anyone had observed him, they might have wondered how blind eyes could have spotted such a careful path on the slick ice. But the milky eyes of Brago were not blind; the ruby irises had contracted to the point of invisibility. And if that person had stopped to question the demon, they might have quailed under the amount of sorrow and anger those white eyes held, a white darkness.
In this lonely place, not even the winged creatures of the night made a sound. The freezing wind sighed and blew on, swallowing up the crunch of snow underfoot. The trees silently watched as Brago stopped and let out a howl of despair. All the laments of this forlorn place swept unexpressed with his, mingling and changing into a keen of misery, a sonata of grief, welling up from deep inside and spilling over the ice, freezing before the notes hit the ground, the meaning burned away. Like a ripe fruit wrung dry, bursting its life shell and wilting away.
Brago faded with his dirge. Wind, take me away…
The icy wind lingered around his heart, aching with every pump of blood. Brago knelt and stared at the face mirrored in the frozen waters. A shock of blue-black hair, with tiny chips of sleet melting down his pale cheeks. A mouth struggling to take the quiver out of its lips, blue with cold. A face someone had loved.
He looked at his hands. Long white fingers, pointed black nails. Strong hands. Someone had loved these hands, loved to hold them, loved to touch them.
He thought of what his hands had done. Monster hands.
Sharp teeth, waiting in his mouth. A mouth someone too, had loved. Someone…
…But it's no use thinking of someone who isn't here. There. Anywhere at all.
He remembered her.
The smile. The dress. The years of travel. Her eyes, her laugh, her everything. The warmth she had given him, gone.
The smile, gone. Replaced with what? A ghastly reminder of who she once was, leaving the world as a shell, sluggishly imprinting forever the memory of what had happened, instead of what could have been.
He closed his eyes, pushing the tears he pretended weren't there down his face, slipping softly down and freezing halfway. Inside his dark world he saw bursts of patterned lights dance behind his eyelids, and then swirling away into black. She was his color, he needed her. She was his reds and silvers and blues, his green grasses and orange-tinted sunsets. He was only black. A soot mark on the vast field of snow and glistening ice. A piece of the dusky sky fallen to earth.
Brago pushed his body into the ground, moving the slush aside to place his face against the frigid dirt. He lay there, listening to the thump of his heart, waiting for the earth's rhythm to join his. The wind sighed in his ear and drifted to the sky, and the lands steady beat did not come. He turned his face to the sky. Stray snowflakes settled on his face, tracing his eyelids and dwindled into cold water drops, mixing with his hot tears. The sky's tears and his own, moving as one.
She must be up there.