"Sarah…"
He sighed her name, and the reverberation of his despair cast a chill over the land. He knew she still heard him, always there, singing songs in her mind.
"Everything I've done, I've done for you."
"Sarah…"
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, just to catch a glimpse of her. He watched her in the crystals, when he could, 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 slightly parted in a smile. He wanted her as his slave, degraded, sitting at his feet, 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 whispered in desperation, the name spilling from him as a venomous curse and reverent prayer at once.
How she'd grown. It was so short a time here… time ran so differently in the Above. He began to worry, because less and less would she stand at the mirror, now. Less and less would she stare into the depths of her reflection, warm in the knowledge that there was so much more there than others saw. Less and less would she turn and stop at the sound of his wings flicking, slicing through wintry air like so many feathered blades.
He became frightened. She was forgetting. She was forgetting, and he had never needed her more desperately.
She was becoming a woman, now, and it was little more than a child that he had loved before. A child's fantasies had he bent before. Sometimes when she stopped, sometimes when he sliced the air, he could see the hope and regret in her eyes. He wondered if, perhaps, his Sarah would come to him. She was forgetting…
He breathed deep, feeling the now-familiar stabbing sensation within his breast that made it difficult to breathe. Gods, it was getting worse!
Painfully, he gathered up a crystal, and leaned back to gaze into it. Surely enough, there she was, standing at the mirror. It had been so long since the last time she looked, and who knew how long it would be until she looked again? Who knew how weak he would be when the time came. Waiting was over… it must 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.
"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.