Forbidden Adytum
Elise H. M.
Hello everyone! I know it's been a long while but here is something new and I sincerely hope you enjoy this as much as I did writing it.
*I do not own anything but my ideas. All characters and the Twilight Saga belong to Stephenie Meyer*
Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality. ~ Emily Dickinson
Chapter 1:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Florence, Italy
19th Century
In a lush green pasture, there was a young beautiful woman who was picking flowers. The white fluffy dahlias were clutched loosely in her hands as she stopped to tuck a few into her sienna locks. The sun beamed down proudly at her, illuminating her skin to sparkle like the rarest diamond known to man.
But it was nothing compared to the loving gaze that watched her from the nearest hill only a few feet away. That gaze belonged to a fool in love. This feeling he possessed whenever he was near her never seemed to cease. It was this foreign feeling that he had a deep confession about:
He didn't know much about love.
"Come on, you slow poke! You said you'd be over here to frolic with me!" Didyme shouted, waving her flowers in the air. From the distance, she looked like a shimmering angel. That's what he always believed.
"I'm coming, love." Marcus yelled and got up from his spot to wipe the excess cornfield grunge from his trousers.
He looked up to her bright face. She was beaming like sunshine. He let out a sigh and smiled to himself. How beautiful she was...
Just the pull of her lips at the corners cast a light spell around him and made him burst from the inside. Didyme made him happy; not just from the power that she bore, but from her face. How could any man not succumb to the charms of such an amazing specimen; the sultry smoky eyes set above luscious cheeks and lips, the pale skin framed by bewitching dark hair?
The field of grass stretched over the bountiful hills behind him and slowly morphed into a flower meadow in front of him. He walked from green blades to colorful petals, approaching their sweet fragrance.
He remembered when he first saw her.
"Come on, Marcus!" she shouted impatiently. "I'm not getting any younger over here."
"But you are getting more and more beautiful," he shouted, sauntering over to her. He was just close enough to wrap a tendril of a dark curl around his pale finger. And that he did.
Her hand grasped his from her hair. "What took you so long?" she pouted, wrapping her fingers around his. Her eyes were a smoldering crimson; they held a depth so deep, he was still afraid of the descent.
He remembered when her eyes first drew him in. He saw a woman, where she stood by her brothers' side as a believing sister. And she captivated him from the beginning, delivering that special combination of light and darkness. It was the kind of combination that created magnetic spark, the kind that drew one in and kept one out with a power that couldn't quite be grasped...but he wanted to keep chasing it.
He knew her power was madness, but it had a beauty he could not resist. She had energy, passion, and drive. She looked impossibly gorgeous for the impossible years she possessed by the time he came to meet her formally.
He held the best vantage point in the throne room to see all before him; a glance always revealed her lilting smile and her warm Grecian eyes. His soul cried out for her, but her unsung song had kept her anonymity. The descent was darkest at it's most innocent.
When the white flowers moved in the breeze below him, he always saw her lovely eyes. Breathing in deeply, he used her poison with ease. He drank and drank from her, running on her sunshine rays with laughter.
"I want to steal you and run away, my dear," he growled, burying his face into her raven hair. She threw her head back on to his shoulder and her laughter was like the chimes of the wind - light and playful. "Well what are you waiting for?"
She yelped and screamed, laughing and running from her fierce lover.
They both landed with a soft thud on the cluster of dandelions. The white flakes circled around their heads and created a soft halo to protect them. Didyme breathed loudly, laughing still from their silly game of cat and mouse. Marcus turned to her and just stared.
"What?" she asked.
"You're beautiful, that's all," he whispered and looked up at the sky above him. The clouds were like white puffs of cotton.
"What are you waiting for?" She turned her face to his. He could finally feel the truth, staring right there in front of him asking, why?
Considering how young she was, she was scarily smart. She knew how to sense what her feelings concealed; she was unnaturally quiet and passive, her red eyes shining too bright in a pale flower face. The years that passed were scarce, but the tokens of time paid him not only in luxurious items, but a wealth no other man would ever posses. It was in the form of frivolous reddened eyes, tangled hair, and a torn, bedraggled gown that she didn't dare patch up.
Didyme still looked striking, still impassably exotic, the insane intensity in her eyes a bit more settled, accepting…
There she was, on his arm, staring up at him for an answer he couldn't even figure out himself. He ran a hand through her flower strewn hair and sighed.
Didyme was always a victim going over the edge of sanity but he didn't think that gave her enough credit. To him she had always been a monster that accepted the sanity within, without letting it consume her.
He kissed the sexy pout of her mouth.
"I've waited for the cause of the fear the future. I fear the outside world not accepting us as they've come to accept a new trend."
"We're not here to let them observe us. We're here to live life to the fullest together, not become animals in a cage for all to see. Marcus, we're trapped here; we can be free together. It wouldn't matter anyway…."
He smirked. "And why's that?"
She ducked her head into his neck, kissing her way up from his collarbone to the tip of his jaw. "I'd have you as my prisoner in our home from dawn till dusk! You'll never get away. Ha!" she giggled, kissing his lips.
"You'll keep me captive, won't you?"
"I'll never let you flee."
"Promise?"
"You can count my crowned jewels. Absolutely."
With that he flipped them over as she squealed in joy.
The tingles from up his spine intensified into electrical currents that couldn't be taken by sitting down. Marcus shot up from his throne chair and broke himself from his mind. It was a memory, just a memory. He was surrounded by the familiar place of the throne room of the castle in Italy with the distinguishable scent of death in the air.
Aro was stunned into silence temporarily at his sudden outburst. He turned his face and continued to speak to Caius.
"-as I too love our nature...but laws must be obeyed no matter what one's personal feelings."
"Indeed, I am in total agreement, Brother." Caius remarked coldly, scrutinizing the beheaded corpse in the middle of the room.
It certainly caught Marcus' attention. He frowned at the deceased body of yet another immortal man. Death was imminent in a place like this. Would it ever stop? He could no longer take it since they got back from Forks, Washington; the throne room became a blood bath.
"I would love your appraisal brother, Marcus." Marcus looked up from the attention from his wouldn't hold back on his thoughts.
"Well, I sadly disagree. I have been the fool for all these years. You think you can scavenge your way to royalty with these games, these entries - it's disgusting," he merely whispered with a thoughtful expression.
Aro took a step back, genuinely surprised that his brother had something to say. But he eyed his companion defensively with a look of lost evil that had resurfaced over all these years. Marcus reached to his feet and walked over to the corpse sadly.
"Another lost soul, baffled by the challenges of the new world. What is it that we have proven by committing this?" He brushed his hand across the cracked marble cheek of the helpless cadaver; his facial expression was one of full horror. Its mouth gaped open, eyes of bloodshed and skin like granite, cracked like a priceless vase. He looked up.
"Not all find their way, Aro. Has showing them become such a burden that violence, killing, seems to be the only resolution when it comes to you gaining power?" Marcus conceded his statement with a dangerous glint that Aro noticed quickly. His face then became masked in fear of the topic.
Aro softened his posture and touched Marcus' face tenderly. "Come, let's not fight, brother. All is well, let's not spoil our reunion with talk of death." He tilted his head, smiling sweetly.
He closed his eyes and tuned into his thoughts.
"You may be correct, but if I were you, I would be careful... Life can be so fragile and I would hate to see you separated again." He tilted his head, placing hands on his face as he stared into Marcus' lifeless eyes.
Aro pouted with the innocence of a child. "Why would you think that? What on earth could I…?" Marcus pried Aro's hands from his face and turned on his heel, away from the commotion of his rushed thoughts.
"It wasn't that I was separated, but I've isolated myself for the purpose that will remain to me," Marcus mumbled leaving Aro to ponder for a moment.
"The law is everything!" He watched him turn his back and leave through the corridor.
The law is everything.
It was simply absurd! His anger was something he wouldn't yield. The empty halls were dark and dull, just like him. Marcus walked and thought, walked and thought. He was like a blind dog, following a scent to nowhere.
But after what seemed like hours of wandering, that blind scent did lead him somewhere. A grand door. Her door. His dear Didyme. He hadn't been inside in years, having feared that as soon as he would open the door, her scent would waft from the room and he could never enjoy it again. The handle was faint with her scent, just barely there. He reached for it and it felt tiny in his hands.
He didn't want to move from the doorway.
In the latter image in Marcus's mind, her room's once-elegant architecture had faded to squalidness. The walls were cracked and crumbling, hard and gray. It used to be golden and bright just like her personality. She always kept the windows open to always brighten up the room, because she felt as if it were dreary all by itself. The wide boulevard arched door was uninviting, almost devoid of the former bustle of the mid-18th century. And that didn't even begin to describe the cracked, dingy, neglected interior of the once beautifully furnished room. The image was clearly a diminished place, whose strength and beauty had faded under sustained abandonment.
Marcus stepped inside and covered his mouth in horror. His neglecting her legacy wasn't a true lover's dedication. Didyme's death rocked him to a place he never thought he would be; without her. They wanted forever - they'd had forever - but they'd lost it as soon as it began.
Dozens and dozens of images played in his mind as he explored this loss of vitality and beauty. And many had revealed the violence inherent in such decay and ruin. Her room possessed the irrevocable destruction fully on display.
The once-luxurious, excessively ornate decor of the bed chamber—all the plaster and marble and gilt that once covered the arches, vaults, recessed window bays, and doorways—was now cracked, crumbling, and turned to dust. The walls and floors were coated with ghost-white and dingy residue thick as snow in winter. And in the middle of the room, resting on its side as if violently cast aside, a grand piano gave another hint at the space's former grandeur. It looked, in its toppled state in this image, much like the "Dying Gaul," if that sculpture had been left out on the field of battle.
These ruins, the decay—the dying piano seemed to have been saying with its wrenching last words—it wasn't just a death of a decoration and its monuments. It was the death of a joyful soul.
He was the first shining armor that became rusty over night. He was completely rendered useless.
He wasn't there during the cold dawn of awakening. She died a death not even he could believe.