A/N: Valtor is recounting the foolishness of the notions he had about his relationship with Griffin.
She'd been like water, pure and vital, and gentle, soaking up everything she touched with life, including his soul of fire. She'd been his opposing force, capable of reining in his flames and extinguishing him, and yet he'd been afraid that he'd be the one to hurt her. Destruction was all he knew, all he was good for, and he'd feared that even the endless flow of her love wouldn't be enough to tame his flames. He'd been scared she'd evaporate under the aggressive burn of his darkness, leaving behind only a cloud of hot steam scalding his face and melting the skin off the bones. For no matter how different, they were one and the same, and destroying her would be the end of him as well.
Then she'd taken it in the opposite direction, turning into hard, unforgiving ice that trapped his heart in her grasp, biting viciously at it and leaving her marks all over him. Every little crack she could find, she filled and ripped open, leaving him fissured and fractured and ready to collapse, his pieces crumbling to dust. And it wasn't enough. She reached inside his chest with her cold hand and ripped his heart from his ribcage to store it in one of her making. She put it in a block of ice and back inside him, knowing full well that he wouldn't freeze like death and yet would feel like he had only to keep living in the aftermath of her betrayal. It was far more cruel than anything he could've done to her, far more vicious even than his thoughts of revenge. But it was his own fault for thinking fire could hurt water and that she'd spare him if he fell in love with her.
How foolish it had been of him to think opposites attract. They did, but they could never come together as one whole. It was a destructive dance, a fatal attraction that he was now paying for with his life. For the only endless thing was the agony her absence was drowning him in. And the only thing he was left with was the desire to rain pain and carnage upon the universe because that was the only way to get his flames to burn something else and not his own insides instead. And there was nothing to soothe his wounds and help him heal when his life had drained from him the moment she'd slipped through his fingers.