Shadewood sandwiched between heaven and hell

@Cry

Approaching the den they shared was a task far more onerous than the empress had appraised - her paws stung bitterly where she'd chewed away the cold flesh in her self-loathing, and the scent of her husband lingered in the air like a cloud tipped full of the most compulsive drug; whether it meant he was around, or it was simply the aroma he'd left during their last sleep together, she couldn't know.

But it hurt.

Swathed in memories was her mind, yet somehow clearer than it had been before. Space was what provided her with the courage she required, darkest cerulean glimmering through the shadow of the entrance in feeble search of the man she craved - it wasn't just a longing any more, it was a burn, a desire carved deep into her chest, between her rips where she was unable to unlodge it. Her love for Cry, for Raziel, it was perpetual. Unabating. It drove her insane, but her steps always led back to him, and this frozen afternoon was no different.

The Eruna couldn't avoid him any longer.

"Raz...?" came her quiet whisper, gaze adjusting to the dark of the den and urgently searching - if he was not there, she'd spread her gown into the furthest reaches of the woods to track his scent. The longer she waited, the more unbearable it all became.

mad asf I couldn’t get to the other posts being swamped sucks turtle dick

Cry had nearly perished quite a few times under his mental duress. The strain of it all-

Ice could hold, but eventually it would crack, and send it’s cargo plummeting into arctic seas.
And the ex-assassin had developed several cracks what seemed eons ago, when truly it had been only a few days prior...or had it? Had it been a week? A month? Had it been merely hours? His concept of time was unhinged, unstable as he sped in a pirouette direct to mindless droning. Slade had already begun to visit the sick man, darkness creeping closer to his peripherals as the Nightmare King stalked his prodigy, followed and whispered endlessly

”You would learn, eventually.”

And he had. Learned that love was a beast that could not be buckled and tamed under any hand whether it be experienced or not. It was not some beast that could be hunted and slain to fulfill any belly. And in the unrighteousness of it all, Slade was right.
He wasn’t meant to love. 

His despair had had wittled him to reclusiveness within the woods, to wander in makeshift circuits around the territory as though he were defending it from some unknown enemy. Unending, and never stopping to even eat nor drink, he kept to his duty while it drained him of life. He, while once robust and healthy, was a shade now. A true sprite of shadow, thin and wispy in lank, haggard and stench-drenched from his own uncontrolled bodily functions. They were stale however, as he hadn’t eaten nor drank since he began relinquishing his existence. What had been a thick and lavish pelt hung from him now in sloppy strands, unkempt and wet. What were very perceptive icelandic jewels were now dull gusts of ice against the haze, and drowning in a fog of near lifeless haze.

But on he kept, he though. Following those trails that he had thought he had made earlier though they be askew by miles, he kept to doing his job. A job of warding evil from his family, his imagination filling in blanks that only grew longer and more dramatic. He had chased off bears, giant birds, and even old members of the Nightmare Elm, providing he was still useful, or so he though.

Until even his fantasies couldn’t hold him up as he collapsed in the embrace of the snow,

the last words from a cracking voice-

“I love you.”

What initiated the panic attack was not standing by the den, realising that he was not there.

It was when she came upon his thin body, clumps of black fur hanging limply over his frame, body collapsed in the ivory snow; Knew, she saw, for a moment. He was dead. But the very sight of her love so very still in the ground, whispering words to the wind as though it would answer his call and breathe life back into his body, it blasted her with a momentum that not even a swirling storm could achieve.

 "Gwen!" 

No. Stop it!

More steps drew her closer, and when she was finally standing still above him, a strangled sob fell from her white maw as she peered down at the figure limp in the snow. "K...Knew?" She croaked, voice feeling rough and foreign against her throat. 

"-I'm so sorry."

She couldn't- b-breathe, lungs shuddering, chest heaving--

The wolf's head rolled limply to the ground, as if all hope had evaporated and the pain he felt had been too much for him to handle. ​Bones protruded like gaping jaws from his side, body thin, a smudge that the world soon would wipe from its surface. His face, torn with guilt, her face, torn with terror--

the pain.

he was gone.

GONE.

The fallen queen's vision was curtained in black, and between gasping sobs she trembled and sunk down to the frozen earth, body crumpling beside the shadow of Raziel and tears streaming down her cheeks. They wouldn't stop.

They just kept coming.

With nothing but silence enhaling his mind, when the rustle came for him, he honestly suspected it to be Slade. But in his mind, he could feel bliss. In his mind, he knew grace had come to whisk him away and put him where the souls who had tried to salvage their blessings over their sins would be, a nicer limbo. A place where he could see Gwen, smiling, but where he wouldn’t be able to touch her. 
He didn’t deserve to touch her. 
Not anymore.

The helix of guilt sucked him from the thoughtful coma, and it spat him back into the cold world he was locked in. He was entirely too close to death, and while he couldn’t wish for death anymore than he already was - but he had a mission. 

“Protect-    Family..” the words lift his dry tongue in a rasp like nails against bark. 
Mans he forced himself back to his fours, clearly unable to move further as he couldn’t even recognize the difference in crying outside his head from the wails within.

He didn't even see her.

The fallen empress had returned to the transparency of ghosting, when eyes skimmed over her body with barely a fraction of their attention - nobody cared. A selfish thought perhaps, in the gazes of those who surrounded her, but one that sprung from the darkness of her head regardless. Breaths came in short gulps of shivering air, but her lungs felt heavy and weighted, pulled down with led to the earth in which one day, her corpse would come to lay.

It felt, some days, that she was already dead.

Rasping words met the plush pearls of her ears, and she pushed as forcefully as she could against the shadow king's shoulder - pleading, begging him over and over again to wake up. To snap out of it. "Raz," she moaned in grief, "Ra-" don't leave me. Please, please, please... i'll be good. I promise. I'm sorry. she still- couldn't... couldn't breathe... oh god, he was never going to- he wouldn't see her again. Wake up. Wake up.

"Raziel! P-Please," A shout, a cry for whatever of him remained. Sharp whines pierced the air from her muzzle, a darkened queen who'd lost her kingdom. He was her everything - without him, Gwendolyn was nothing.

Voices - or rather a voice he knew, pained, agonized, tormented - it desperately yanked at the curtain of haze that had blanketed his stalking mind with tumultuous heaves. And not much after, a push that had knocked his weak form forward, far from the stability he once had been. A titan brought to become a twig. But that shive was what his body needed, what his mind needed, to be given a sliver of sight through that fading abyss he had begun slipping into. 

And he saw her, then. 

Weak and pitiful, he laid on the frigid ground and brought his melting glacials to the drowning sapphires he couldn’t help but dive into every single blessed chance he got to stare into them. The name left his lift shamefully, tears dripping from the hymn of the ‘n’ that finalized her calling. “Gwen...” he didn’t deserve to speak to her. But he dared that enchanting name sail free betwixt them. He was a sorrowful weight right now. 

But he hadnt dared forget her name. 

White silk pressed into the darkest of shadows, bathing herself in the blanket of his warmth - she depended on it, relied on the safety of his protection, the security of his compassionate embrace.

"Raziel," she murmured again, unable to part from his touch. They were two tormented souls, ripped apart from their futures and cast into the depths of an ocean built with waves of irresolution, unascertained destinies. "No me dejes solo," came a gut-wrenching sob, reaching up her muzzle to groom tenderly along his chin.

Never. Please don't leave me.

The foreign words fell across his heart with a click of understanding in his tattered mind, sewing the heated and charred pieces with memories. They refreshed his grip as the haze began to fade, his memories of Gwen teaching him spanish in their fleeting moments together so far and seemingly endlessly long ago. "I would never," the gritty voice scratched out, obviously straining for water seemingly with the words spoken. There were a few other languages Cry was familiar with, but Gwen had been the only one to introduce him to the language of Spanish...the language matched her almost perfectly. The words melded together with such subtlty, so shimmery and smooth as though they were the vocal version of the woman, herself. Was she molded after the language? Or had it been crafted so perfectly after her, because of her?

Her warmed lips, her exhales into his inhales, the Empress once again brought life to this dying soldier. She would not let his duty end.

"Never."