Cedar Sweep Deep within you til you will not want me any other way

By the riverside her footsteps slowed to a prancing halt, chin tilted back over her shoulder to lock eyes with her shadow (@Makan). Here the trees thinned and the water whispered — and now the light behind her ametrine eyes darkened to something like hunger. Something that invited him to end his hunt.

Alara swept around to meet the shadow at her back. Around them, the forest fell into gloom, abandoned by the setting sun. She didn't mind it so much; Sea-Snakes were born into the dark, before all else.

And perhaps her shadow would feel more at home among his kin.

In the shadows, he was just another one of them. Melted into the dead sun and the fall trees that mimicked his limbs. He could have been born from this moment for all he replicated it in his own body.

Only the deep blue of his eyes gave him away as not being one with the shadows.

They were too richly colored to be described as the waters of the land but too bright still to be a night sky.

It wasn't him that mattered though. It was her and how the hunt seemed to come to some kind of close. Oh, would it ever truly end? Never in full, but in this moment he weaved around the dark bases of trees full of shadows.

When close enough he reached towards her. Entirely uncertain what he would do if he ever met the mark.

Lmk if the powerplay isn't okay <3

He never would meet his mark.

She met him first — not with teeth bared but arms seeking to wind around him, to pierce through the shadowy flesh of him and draw out the deepest most secret pieces for herself. Alara shuddered softly at the warmth of touch, a foreign thing after so many months. Soft, breathing, alive.

Not a shadow at all but a man.

Not a ghost at all but a woman.

Was she weeping?

<3

She controlled the hunt.

She controlled him.

What had once been a ghost was warm against him. Flesh and blood, a heartbeat buried within there. He wanted to latch his teeth around her heart. He could guard it if it rested between his jaws.

Her between his arms would have to be enough.

A deep sound was strummed beneath the scar tissue of his neck.

For a time her tears fell, and she only stayed there, perhaps searching for what she'd lost so long ago in his embrace. You can never come back. Did her shadow know what lost treasure he'd found?

A wayward Sea-Snake; a rare, sad thing. A wrong thing. A thing destined to end in tragedy.

At times she still tasted the salt of the sea.

Alara did not know how much time had passed when she finally spoke. Do you know the way to the sea? Her voice was thin and wavering with disuse, but still beautiful, she noted silently with some small vain pleasure at the fact. A siren might lose her home, but never her voice. Never that.

He could not say he ever took pleasure in tears, but he found there would always be something rare and treasurable in being the one to see them fall.

He would have watched it forever. He would have made constellations of her tears, named each one after a star and used them like a map.

The world was darkness only when her voice reached his ears. A good listener, it was nearly all he had going for him.

And her voice deserved to never be spoken over, only listened to.

He could not speak but something rose within his throat as a sound. Basic and primal, but how badly he hoped she would understand. I will find it. His hunt could be for more than just — this.