~~~~~``
Lia awoke slowly, the fresh morning air cool on her face. Opening her green eyes, the first thing she saw was the last teetering sapphire in the hourglass, and Terrin sitting on the floor, eyes closed, face turned to the sunlight.
"Terrin?" she whispered, and one goldenbrown eye opened slowly.
"Yes?"
"What's going to happen now?" Lianah asked fearfully. He shook his head, no less afraid than she felt.
The boy stood up carefully, muscles creaking. "Is it still..." he moved in front of the witched mirror, yet his reflection did not show any purifying glow around his form. He smiled sadly. "I suppose I shall be taken, then. Still tainted." She raised her own arms, and the aura of rose and gold blurred the edges.
"I didn't actually believe," she began slowly, "that this day would ever come. I knew it in my mind, but I didn't believe it..."
She ran to hug him, jumping down from the pile of quilts, her crumpled skirts wrinkled. Resting his forehead on her shoulder, he murmured, "I actually thought...that I might be cured. But in it's own way, I have been healed, Lia."
"You're still going to be taken into the shape," she muttered into his shirt front bitterly.
"And even if I do," he told her sternly, "I'll be a better person anyway. You've taught me much, Lia, about love and caring. No matter what happens, I'll remember that, somewhere in my mind." She sobbed harder, and he managed to stroke her tangled hair with a shaking hand.
"No matter what, anyway," he continued, voice tired, "I would be taken. In some way or another, soul drunk by that monstrosity or becoming a bird myself."
"And what will happen after?" she asked, quietly. For a moment, wondering what her life would be like alone in the palace, as Terrin had lived for years.
"I don't know, love."
But as he spoke those words, the last sapphire slipped over the incline of the hourglass with a soft yet definitive crystal plink.
She lost conciousness soon after the sound rang through the room, and emerged from blackness sobbing into his arms. "I won't let it happen," she yelled, voice echoing through the halls. "I'll do...something!" Terrin shook his head, clinging to her both from sympathy and for his own comfort.
~~~~~~~~~
Perhaps it was error, or cruelty, that the goldenhawk appeared many fearful hours after the last sapphire dropped.
The shimmering feathers were plainly seen against the darkening sky, rising above the pure crescent of the moon and diamond stars. "It's here," Terrin whispered, his voice diminishing with fear. "Lia, you must leave. Hide somewhere."
"No."
"Please, Lia."
"No."
"Then hide! There is no more time," he gasped, and she dove behind the mahogany bedframe as the creature alighted on the balcony rail. It cocked one pearly eye at him, and he shrank back.
As if in a trance, he stared into it's large, whirling eyes. The images within their void chilled him, of doomed humans screaming, their souls and bodies taken within the creature for nourishment. Despair stinging in his mind, Terrin breathing became ragged at the last image: a second bird, wings enveloping his own dear Lia.
"Run!" he shouted, but the phoenix-like creature's head had already turned to the girl behind the bedpost. The image in it's eyes changed once more, to two golden birds taking flight, the empty room left behind them.
Terrin's heart froze, and all his bitterness and fear melted away. "No," he shouted, in fury. "Perhaps me, but not Lia. Never will she be taken-" and his throat closed, knowing that it would be he, in bird-form, to kill her. "I'll die, first." His hands grappled at the table, searching for some weapon or object with which to tear his life.
His fists closed on air, and the bird advanced until his back pressed to the enchanted mirror. No longer frightened, he simply sought a way in which to end his life for Lia. Along the back of his arms, golden feathers appeared, and Lia gasped from her position by the bed. "Run," he whispered, but no longer had a mouth to speak with.
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