Soteria

[Thalia]

The ink bled into a revolution of images against his chest. Magics stirred, not just the shifting freedoms of the dream, and Nimeda’s skin prickled at the curl of something ancient woven into his blood. Entwined deeper, even. Her eyes were round, transfixed, her lips slightly parted. Emotion crested, too much of it too quickly to understand, and she didn’t try, but her own heart began to pound as the last flick of the final symbol fell into place.

Tristan’s chest heaved, his obsidian eyes flared and unblinking. Such deep and fathomless voids made it difficult to perceive his emotion, but she did not look away. The tide swept her up into something beyond herself, and she let it pull her deeper without consideration or fear of drowning. Was he afraid? Movement flickered against the black like the stone of his uncle’s grave; looping swirls she could not discern but to wonder what he might see behind its film. Her hand hovered out, on the verge of pressing flush to the symbol on his heart like it might squeeze past the bars, but it was not fear that stopped her.

He scooped her up, and she did not resist. Her edges felt loose, like a thread plucked sharp enough to leave her spinning, and her forehead touched light to his before he laid her down. The lids of his eyes lowered away from her as he did so; it was not something she’d normally notice, and she was not sure why she did now, yet her hand reached as though about to cup the side of his face. A soft gasp stole instead for passions renewed, and her fingers caressed the shaved sides of his head as he shielded it away. Her own eyes closed for a moment, but it was the glyph that burned, and she did not want to sink into how such an impossibility persisted.

“Do you feel how hard it’s beating, Tristan?” Wonder touched her whisper for the vast stir of feeling evoked in her own chest, words falling into the silken breath of distraction for the way he moved. She didn’t know what he had seen, though she knew well the nature of the dream. Neither did she know how he perceived the changes wrought in himself. Nimeda did not submerge herself too deeply into that understanding, though it pulled at her, and if she did not put it to words she did let herself feel it fully. It was why she spoke of her own heart now, sorrows and passions roused as deep and clear as the waters of the lake. 

Her trailing touch found his jaw, threading soft into the thickness of his beard. Her body moved responsively beneath him, thighs wrapping, back arching, and the hot stir of his breath against her breasts was far from unpleasant, yet she coaxed him up for a different reason, urging like the guiding banks of the riverbed until the whisper of her words caressed close enough to taste against his own lips, like the promise of sanctuary. "I do not know what it is you see in the darkness, but I will not leave you alone there." She would not force him to exhume such secrets as he buried himself away from, nor even to open his eyes, yet neither was she afraid of what strange magics stirred alongside ancient chains.