((My entry for the Second PFN Morbidity Contest. As with my other darkphics, please note that this is not my normal canon, so don't be horrified at any events or characterisations herein. But it is E/C, for the people who have been wanting that from me. Bwahaha. ;) ))

His Living Bride

Christine Persephone

"It's very hard to make yourself loved in a tomb . . ."

She came to him with her eyes, beautiful crystal-blue eyes like the skies over Heaven itself, wide open and brilliant with tears. "Please," she whispered, sinking to her knees at his feet amid a susurrus of white silk. "Please, Erik . . . let him go . . ." Her hands tightened into useless little fists buried in the skirts of the wedding-dress he had put her into, priming her for the final act of the magnificently operatic tragedy he had wrought about them. "Just let him go . . . and I will stay. I will stay."

Erik's hand hovered over the lovely dark curls of her bowed head, but he did not touch them. A single perfect tear slipped from her cheek and was lost amid the whiteness of her skirts. He lifted her chin on the tips of his fingers, measuring the sincerity in her eyes. "Let him live," she pleaded, "and I will be your bride." The promise trembled upon her pale lips, and he knew then that he would not kill her boy.

He removed the noose from the neck of the boy she loved, who would always hold her heart even as he himself held her soul. "She has made her decision," he said, "Go." The boy began to protest, but he silenced him with a gesture. "The laws of my kingdom hold her to her promise. She will stay here as she has said." So he left, across the underground lake Erik had named Averne, which separated his realm from the world above.

Erik returned and raised his bride, trying not to notice how hard she wept to see her beloved and her only hope of rescue depart. He slipped the wedding-ring onto her slender finger, and stood her before him, living perfection. Never had he seen her so beautiful as she was now, his angel-child wreathed in white. He kissed her lips and tasted tears, though she had since stopped crying. She had made her promise.

That night, Christine had promised to become Erik's living bride.

The soft sound of mellifluously rustling silk announced Christine's quiet presence behind him as she entered the room. Erik gestured and obediently his bride came and knelt beside the organ bench, her skirts spreading about her like rose petals. He held out his hand for hers and slid the wedding-ring back onto her finger. She lowered her eyes in apology. It was always slipping off and he was always finding it on the floor where she had been.

He took the crystal goblet of red wine sitting beside the organ and offered it to her. "Will you sing?"

She nodded, taking a sip from the wineglass, then stood. Their voices rose once more, twining and fusing into that unearthly harmony of life and death, light and shadow locked in eternal counterpoint. Christine's eyes were open but she did not seem to notice his watching her, as she existed for the moment in a swell of music. Her song was never so lovely as when she sang for him.

He remembered again why he had kept her, that perfect instrument. He needed her voice. Their shadow symphony was incomplete without it. He had known this all along; Christine, perhaps, would learn it in time. She would have to learn to understand.

From the other end of the polished table Christine watched him pour the wine, watching the red liquid spill smoothly into the glass, watching the candle-light dance in it as he set it down before her. He took his place at the head of the table and watched her run her fingertip around the rim of the glass, eliciting a thread of silver sound.

"Will I never sing above the ground again?" she asked.

"No," he replied automatically, knowing by now not to meet her searching eyes when she spoke to him like this.

"Why?"

"My dear, we have had this conversation already. It is impossible." She did not respond, and he looked up to see her staring distantly at the reflections in the tabletop, her wine-reddened lips turned down in an expression that made her look for the moment so genuinely unhappy that he sighed. "I am sorry, my love. Surely you must realise that they would not longer accept you up there. They would not be able to bear your voice."

"My voice," she said darkly, "is not borne anywhere."

"It is borne here."

"Here," she repeated meditatively, "What is here? We aren't in Heaven. We aren't on Earth. We are beneath the ground but we are not yet in Hell. It's a shadow-land."

"But of course, my dear. We are the Lord and Lady of the Underworld."

"Where the sun never rises and the sun never sets . . ."

"There is no sun here, dear." He reached across and took the wine away from her. It had a tendency to make her wax poetic, and he wasn't in the mood for it to-night.

Candle-light gleamed dully upon burnished ebony and crimson satin as Erik slid back the heavy lid of the coffin where he slept. His bedroom was a tomb in black and red, from the candles in their iron holders to the tapestries lining the walls to the velvet curtains surrounding the coffin itself. The only thing white in it was his wife.

He extended his hand to Christine, who hesitated, reluctant as always – the child never had quite gotten used to his so characteristically macabre interpretation of their marriage bed – but she came as he bid. In the darkness following the extinguished candle, she settled herself beside him and lay as every night in his arms, a fragile entity composed of silk and a whispy scent like that of old roses, perfectly still, yielding, compliant. And cold, so cold, he thought, as he ran his fingertips along her smooth cheek, through the silky-dark ringlets of her hair. The marriage underground had made her like him, so that he feared he would never be able to warm her again.

Her icy little fingers curved around his neck, settling over the pulsing vein in his throat. In the darkness, he heard her sigh, so close that he could nearly feel her lips upon his skin, but not quite.

Like liquid rubies, the wine flowed from the carafe into the glasses, deeply, richly red. Redder still were the precious drops of blood that fell, swirling finely, into one of them. Bandaging the wound once more, Erik carried the two glasses into the music room. As ever, Christine came at his calling and accepted her wineglass and the ring she had dropped again near the organ.

"I'm sorry," she whispered as he placed the ring again upon her finger. He waved away her apology and opened the score on the music stand. It was a work in progress, a new opera composed around them, around her voice, entitled Proserpine. He needed her for it; Christine alone could give voice to the Queen of the Underworld.

She sang at his bidding, sang of immortal sorrow, of the loss of innocence, of eternal winter in the sunless realm beneath the earth. She sang in the voice of a lost soul trapped forever in a shadowy limbo, wed to darkness, bound by a promise. Angels and demons would have wept at its beauty, but Christine's eyes were dry.

Afterwards he turned the bench and gathered her onto his knee, where she allowed him to run his deft fingers over her hair. "What will we do when it is finished?" she asked.

"It can never be performed, I'm afraid. It is not music for mortal ears."

"Then let's take it away with us into that grave where we sleep, and never wake again."

"My long-lost love," he whispered into her hair, "is that your wish?"

"How else shall it end? You never wrote anything for us except tragedies."

"That is true," he admitted, and held her a little closer, although Christine had become so waveringly frail and intangible there was little left to hold.

So they stayed for a year with little change, husband and wife beneath the ground. Erik allowed Christine to come and go as she would, but she always returned if he called for her. Bound to him, there was nowhere else for her to go. He filled the hours loving her when she was near and missing her when she was not, singing their shadow-song with her and working continuously on the opera that had become their story.

But Christine was growing ever more restless, like the nightingale in her gilded cage. More often now she would drift from his side, wandering their domain in agitated melancholy, or standing on the banks of Lake Averne, sighing after the love she had lost. He began to fear he could not keep her forever.

She watched him now, without horror any longer, as he opened the vein in his arm to let the little beads of blood drop into the wine he gave her. While he bound the wound she raised the glass to her lips, her eyes over the rim of it never leaving him.

"Is the opera nearly finished?" she inquired.

"Not quite. Wait a little longer."

"I have been waiting."

He sighed. "Patience, love."

"I've been patient! Don't you realise? The space of a single night for you is an eternity for me! I am tired of waiting. You can't keep me here like this!"

Erik rose and took her by the shoulders. "You promised me an eternity," he reminded her.

Her eyes hardened like jewels and her lips set in a trembling line. "You promised me Heaven." His fingers tightened in the silk of her sleeves, but she wrested away and fled. He retrieved the ring that had fallen in her violent departure and put it in his pocket to wait for her return.

The opera was nearing its climax, but he worked on it as little as possible now. Christine seemed to sense his reluctance, and hovered fretfully around him, watching him, never far away. She wanted the ending, wanted the proper wedding he had never given her, wanted to take their opera and him and leave for that final dark dream they would never wake from.

"Please," she pleaded, incessant, "please, it's the only way we can be together now."

"You really ought to have considered that earlier, my dear." She shivered with such impotent anger at his apparent lack of empathy that he laughed once, without humour. Christine slammed her wineglass down, so hard that it shattered and fell to the floor in a rain of glittering crystal shards and droplets of red wine.

"You can't keep me like this!" she wailed, in the voice that was borne by neither Heaven nor Hell. "I am tortured every night you wait longer."

"Do not speak to me of waiting!" he snapped, "Or of eternity, or torture, or togetherness. You made me a promise."

"It wasn't fair."

He shook her, so hard that her curls bounced about her face. "Do not speak to me of fair! Were you thinking of what was fair when you broke your promise to me? Were you thinking of what was fair when you walked out into the lake after that boy? Were you thinking of what was fair when you left me for him, Christine?"

He remembered too clearly, as he had the hundreds of nights since, finding her after she had fled from him on their wedding-night. She was floating not far from the shore, angelically pristine in the whiteness of her wedding-gown, her hair drifting silky and nearly black about her perfect face. He waded to her and lifted her out of the dark water, but it was too late. Christine was no longer breathing. The heart that belonged to the boy beat only for him.

But her soul was his, and he had kept it.

"I keep you here to hold you to what remains of your promise," he continued when she glowered at him but did not reply, "If I remember correctly, you did promise to become my living bride. Would you like to see the bride you left me with that night, my love? I kept her, too"

Christine recoiled, but he tightened his grip on her arm and led her inexorably through his room to the room that had been hers, once long ago. It had been arrayed in blue and white to house an angel and now it served as the tomb of one. Where the bed had been there now rested a splendid white marble coffin. Dragging Christine with him, Erik crossed to it and flung back the lid.

The length of a year had reduced the dead Christine to a mere skeleton, withered bones arranged passively in the water-stained silk of her wedding-gown. Her fingers, still strung with the scraps of a few decayed tendons, lightly clasped the crumbling blossoms of her bridal bouquet, and the feathery remnants of her dark curls were strewn upon a pillow of white satin beneath the delicate tulle of her veil. The skeleton stared perpetually Heavenward with hollow eye sockets, as though seeking absolution.

Christine drew back in horror, her voice a thin, trembling sob, and the tears that had been gathering in her luminous eyes finally spilled over. Erik hated it when she cried; nothing was more ghastly than her tears, like jewels of blood, sliding one by one down her flawless cheeks and staining the white of the wedding-dress she still wore.

"Please," she whispered at last, "let me go. Don't make me stay in this limbo forever. If you love me, let me go."

Erik closed his eyes. The opera was as good as finished, and the blood-laced wine would sustain the voice of his dead love, as the blood of the living returned voices to the dead shades of Hades, but not her soul. He could not keep her forever.

He took the veil she had left behind in their crypt of a bridal chamber the night she died from the skull of the corpse and placed it upon her head. Lifting her face in his hands, he caressed away her tears of blood with his thumbs and kissed her. "Go," he said, "I release you." For the first time in a year, Christine smiled.

The wedding-ring fell to the floor with a chime like a tiny passing-bell, as it always did when Christine left. Erik reached down and picked it up, turning the cold metal over in his fingers, then he put it at last upon the skeleton's hand. Going to the music room, he shut the opera manuscript and brought it back to the room that had been Christine's. He lay down in the white coffin, closed the lid, and took his dead bride in his arms to wait for that dream from which they would never wake.

"You were right," he whispered into the corpse's hair, "it is only there that we can be together now."

Fin