Northstar Vale i miss you in the dawn & most of all, your fingerprints, everywhere (mtr.)

@Mahler!

She is without thought: mind split by spires, inviting myriad of color come to ease into the belly of the sky.

Hide of shadowed snow cloaked in thin sheets of summertide mists, the altarless dryad returns to her willow-weeping haunt; it is not long, not at all, before their verdant tips caress her cheek, throat; linger at the dimpling seated between narrow hips. It is not long, not at all, before she cleaves her way through the pondwaters with a heady hum, from ankle to shoulder; breast to chin; mind as adrift and as fathomless as the waters which take her insipidly in arms and shepherd her beneath.

Like a babe in a womb the silver again lingers for as long as she dares; claws anchoring deep into mire; pressing against the navel tethers of pads and their bursting, wilting lilies; caging breath within lungs that soon  (too soon!)  quiver for the airs above. Here, in the dim and shifting lull, she is breathless, heartless, sightless.

Here, the shadow of gothorauk remains unheard.

Still—returning above she has a qualm with that seems more irritance than anything; and when she does, it seems she is more provoked to snip at the cascading rush of pond down crown and shoulder, made like oil by the indecisive and balming day. And because of this, upon one of the many shelves of rock does the naiad drape herself; forever gaunt, the heft that an uncharted ancestry had condemned her to be without. ... But Aurëwen prays it is not too arrogant to believe her figure is lissome, at least; or too concieted to be timidly spirited that at least one eye still gleams.

So, she lies, draped and dozing, flushed beneath the summer's warmth; not, for once, wilting.

overwhelmed and exhausted, mahler had cast off from his shores into the vale where once before a pale and feminine quietude had sought to settle. liri was all the shadowpriest remembered of the place, and he stole into the emerald depths of it gratefully, relieved to be alone for even a short swathe of time.
water; he idly picked his way toward it, where the hymn of water-bugs played cheekily o’ertop the surface of the pool. and here mahler discovered he was not alone, with a singular stab of wrath that threatened to rob breath from his overworked frame.
aurëwen, lolling with a glowing insouciance in the summer heat while the sun licked moisture from her svelte figure. so far from the river where she had made her bed, so far from the injured son that had no doubt befallen his wounds due to her neglect.
mahler waded into the shallows, lilypads brushing against the dark fur of his shoulders, and closed his lavender gaze against the building fury in his breast, against the steel shard of grief lodged in his soul.
”i see you have left him again,” mahler rebuked, his stare coming to lay stonelike upon aurëwen with the ponderous weight of his disdain. an arrogantly beautiful scapegoat for the death of his kill-brother; he felt as though he could merely reach out and snap her willowy neck, lay her upon the water a gleaming ophelia.
the lap of the underwaves loosened dirt from his scarred pads, and beneath that a thin layer of the ironstar’s blood. mahler pulled his gaze from her, mute again as the pond roundabout his ankles grew red-tinged with what of stigmata had accompanied him here to be washed away.

"I seek to mend his marrow, meldonya. It will be here."
And then she cannot speak.

When her lashes unveiled, hauling the fine drapery up and over the glinting argents, they found those invidious amethysts and gazed without fear; without the vanity that comes from such gestures. Within her own lie a downy quiet, all at once pensive and listless, entire. The begrimed contempt of his voice to her seems to wreath about her throat, pressing a seething thumb to the windpipe ‒ it is through a somnolent stirring lower than her stannic heart that Aurëwen returns to the common speak to him:  "And I am no worthy of my son, with ze desolation which I have no right in feeling."  A lull.  "Yet ... I remain to dishonor his presence, and yours. To be so absent."

It was all she could say.

Her breath is shallow and she is voiceless once more against the laden virility of the gargoyle; still yet she feels no alarm. Not for the snarling fangs that wink from between repugnant and dark lips and oh, even his hatred would be welcome if only to reach for him. But her muted gaze flits, following his own, to where red waltzes out through the water, pigmenting the official seal of some soul cast asunder; she can sight no apparent bloodlet otherwise upon his person. 

"May I ask?"  Whom?  And if he would deny her even this ... this, she understood: after all, the silver herself had been the one to have rebelled against his basilisk; she, the one to spit such simmering words into and subsequently invite him to see the sweet son she did not deserve to have had. Her son, who lie abed, restful and also not, just as the mother who now was hollow of so much and only retained so little sensation left.

Eyes were gentled, wondering; hooded and void, though, as she waits without expectancy; situating herself further upon her elbows to meet that cheerless gaze. A flicker of constriction ebbs through the column of moonstone made flesh, unassuming—

somehow still he did not hate her. the red wreathed out into the pond, dissipating. the children of diaspora, all but praimfaya, carried the same within their veins, coursing with small heartbeats. one day they would not remember stigmata, he feared, save for his own efforts in the matter.
but for now he could think only of dragomir, of the foolish woman with her words that managed to be at once both heartfelt and empty, saccharine. she knew she was not fit, and yet she remained unrepentant. a child, her child, had been scored in both body and spirit by wolves. had she searched for who had hurt the boy? had her wretched verx?
a sweep of his charcoal ears toward the sylph now. why sully stigmata's name by uttering it in her presence? a trilling insect broke the quiet, and mahler lifted his chin somewhat. now, another time; aurëwen would know what had happened to his general eventually.
"if i vas dragomir's father," he responded in a brackish tone not befitting the heat shimmering upon the surface of the waters, "such vickedness vould not have come to him." mahler was confident in this, determined to maintain his focus upon the dove's transgressions. let him keep to his breast the memory of his kill-brother; aurëwen did not deserve to know what had happened in her destructive wake.
waves encircled the gargoyle as he finally turned toward her, delivering to her melancholy sprawl the full force of his coldly attentive presence.

He would not tell. But, then—
The stormborn had, by her own study, allowed himself to fester into fever.  “No. No, Dragomir, he ... wished for a moment away from me.”  And she’d only meant to respect his wishes, well and truly; but by the hour they had discovered their son had been taken to some place unseelie...  “Ze fault lies with myself, once more.”   There was no self-pitying in what she said; and her chords only fragmented from then on.

“You have seen my children come into this world, and meant to take ze realm where I spilt ze blood of their birth between my teeth. Hate me.”  He had been there, and she thinks she had glimpsed the wavering of mauve within his veiled guise. She still thinks she had.  “You regarded my person with honor in ze hour where there had been none,”  chords strained, softened, as the ink of evendim gentles the limnal edges of stars,  “you loved my brood. You have raised them, and m-m—”  and her breath stuttered, rattling that too-fragile heart. But it was breaking for the third, perhaps fourth time; once more all of Aurëwen’s own accord.

This was not to say that the silver had no love remaining for her children, or that Vercingetorix did not love them at all; and yet, for one such as she who had given such supposedrapture for the wayward father of her children, only for that balefire to have been smothered with the soot of her own ruinous words ... perhaps this is what made the silver so unfit a mother.

“I should have stayed.”  Should have remained in the shadows of the basilisks’ spire, and given several fathers to her children in the absence of theirs; rather than shiver and vow to seek he who had gone from them.

She should be ashamed to even breathe in the same light as the varmint; knowing he would very well dagger into her thrumming vein for all she had wrought upon his realm, his lord. So Aurëwen cast her disgraceful argents from his presence, brow crescented with the weight of all her condemned infamy. “Hate me with all your soul. ... It should have been you. O!—”   Perhaps, had she given herself to one such as he before her, austere and invidious, she may not have roamed rampant with flame for all the moons to come. Perhaps, with a male such as he, she might have been the mother her children wished her to be; that their father had once lauded her to be.

But Aurëwen knew now she was undeserving of caresses; of a lover’s sough into her neck; of a babe’s kisses to her nose; even moreso than to nurture what she could not and she was never meant to be a mother. Dark lashes fell heavy upon shorn cheek, for no doubt would she have grown into a befitting guide for her brood upon her own, still: “You should have made me,”  feeling an ache in her breast for the stygian she knew not how to pray to. Made me a mother; made me stay.

And then, a warbling beg, bitten. Red lips wisped repentance, which would most surely seem repuslive:  “Mahler,”  to who she had no right in aching for as much as she did in this moment; not when she had desecrated so much of her own; not when she was so unforgivably maudlin, so even in this. Please, hate me so!—

a tremble dragged at the musiker's jaw, more visible than he would have liked. the water in which he stood had become cloying, but he did not haul his bulk from it, not yet, for his eyes were trained intently upon aurëwen and the plaintive coo of her accented voice.
another time, mahler would have forgiven her everything, seen in her restlessness a broken and unfufilled heart, and sought to mend it. but she had become a mother who had never put aside her wanderlust, and in many instances, had placed her own desires above the needs of her children. the little stars would have thrived upon the rich dark loam of diaspora; he would have given her as many scouting missions as she needed to satisfy the deep and untouched well in her heart.
i should have stayed, and here the gargoyle dipped his scarred muzzle with a weariness that ran marrowdeep and bitter. it was beyond her son and her daughter, beyond aurëwen herself; it was the feeling of loss. repeated again and again and again, and this time it had rankled its way into the new general's soul-chords and lodged itself there with a possessive gall.
oh, cursed creature he was! mahler did not immediately recognize the sorrowful intent of aurëwen's changed voice, head lifting in surprise as she spoke of her longing for he himself in a role he could not now play. and now the throated pacing of her tones, the smoke at its edges stealing wisplike across his defenses. 
mahler was threadbare; he inched toward aurëwen and left answering ripples in the glinting surface through which he sliced with a surfeit of something indescribable mounting in his chest. it was not the softness he had felt for ruenna, the satisfaction he experienced with takiyok, the intrigue that ketzia inspired in him. it was altogether different, driven by a mixture of scorn and pity and desperation.
"is that vhat you vant?" he growled when he had come to stand upon the stone plinth, dripping water down upon her feathered body.  that he should make her, that he should engender some satiation, some end to the endless loon-cry of her wayward spirit, tether it to her body with his own. lavender eyes burned toward her own sole orb, roving the scars new and old that had rent her face, and he was silent.

And Aurëwen was fading.

Awaiting rebuttal, druid had anchored away from the gargoyle; fine, sculpted make of her dove’s bones quivering beneath the hide of her throat; marred cheek turned from him; and so his own quaver and crown’s descent had gone unsighted. She would have never known what-ever might had come out of her tellings, for she had never enquired of another her own hurting heart. So she had all but severed herself from the sentinels who she had haunted amongst— 

And then this place with frogsong and its mists ceases to be; fades by a star’s death as Mahler blots before her like a melted inkstain. She feels faint; leaning for him and shying from him without knowing.

As pond-globules tick from the well of him and upon her cheek, wan throat  (each drop a sigil), she glimpses now his features writ with scorn of all that which went unforgiven; piteous of all the druid’s impotence; desperation of all that had been tried in the understanding of a myriad enlivened. They all threaded, thin and fraying, like the lines between celestial points; she would mark this moment, anguishing.

The silver did not deserve one who sought  (albeit at the margins of his endeavors)  and yet she knows she must seal with yes. She wishes to fill him with songs of a gouache moon and the tongue of gold-hot stars; wants in him to feel this indescribable ache that both shies from him and curls in the places between her thighs, and most of all at the tenderness of her throat that’s been so untended to. Her scarred lips part, longing to affirm his belief in Return my soul to me— 

But she is wild and fey, and that indescribable entity of something within her breast keened for the enigma within his own. With such foolish starlight, seeking to know him, her words both wonderment and entreaty:

“Only if you want that, too.”  Should he want this, the tender supplication, invitation, and ... her.
Could he ensnare she, elusive naiad? She, who swore to him her flightful figure and all else in his remaking her? She, wild, fey for-ever; breathing him into her with murmuring rhythms? Could he hold her vehement upon this plinth? Cage her within those waters? Would he want to put to rest such a winged soul? Instill in her a will which she, by giving, vowed to abide? Would he assume his own verdict upon her?

Whatever was in her breast shivered; the hum in her veins only halting for the heartbeat in which he was quiet. And in it, Aurëwen held the burning of his eyes with half of her gleaming own ... before casting them from him once more. Regardless of how she longs for him, of how her blood fevers, of how the thrum of her heart is heard everywhere — nothing is ever certain. 

Regardless of this sacred promise not for her ... with his fangs, would he forever damn her, repulsed; or, astonishingly, bless her, upon her swan’s neck? Both? Neither? 

Another trill of some insect chitters in the lull.

he had reverted to the cold golem he once was; mahler could not more articulate his desires than he could hate the woman before him, as much as she might believe him capable of such things. they were alone here upon their separate islands, even as hers feinted toward him. 
marigold had been a tame and biddable creature, with no fire in her. only the hearthglow of home and motherhood, and it had comforted mahler in myriad ways. they had been too young to know the whims of the world; marigold had given the gargoyle her heart and brought forth his children.
a breath snuffed out by the impassive breath of some force beyond himself she had been in the end, and if he had known others with his body since his wife, mahler had forgotten them, their faces, how they had felt, what sensations they had fed into his flesh. and the urge was slow to rise these past years, for man though he was, he found a thousand reasons why he must not let himself be consumed.
a hawk performed a dive above them, the shadow of its wings flickering against the small shade cast by the canopy, and mahler was moved from his reverie. diaspora held those who loved him, would perhaps even concede to him in their own desires, slake his own. but that sort of joining held a promise the shadowpriest could not make, could not fulfill. he would not let another suffer in the same way that his kill-brother had done, inasmuch as he had loved stigmata.
with aurëwen — mahler lowered his broad scarred muzzle to touch the back of her neck, sweeping lips to the place between the sharp jut of her shoulders, the milieu which truly beckoned to the lusts that he could no longer swallow. the dove held no expectation of him that she could see, no longstanding quest behind her marred gaze, only the sacrilege of their bodies claiming one another in this watery heat.
and so with only a vague reluctance mahler breathed the scent of her tendriled paleness, pillaring her prone form beneath him with all four legs astraddle her cardinal points, and sought to feel with his kiss at last the place where the blood pulsed in her slight neck. weak despite all his slander, despite his pride, despite the reasoning he had given a vaunted role within his logical mind.
grief churned in him; diaspora must not go without his strength, and in aurëwen he might find a place for the pain he could not bid depart his soul.

She, starlit and sacrificial,
muscle  sinew  metal  glass
He, stygian and enshrouded,
straining  strung  strenuous  split
lain and longing.

Mature Content Warning

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: angsty sex character development if u squint

In a timid, trusting intrigue, the syren crescents incrementally beneath him; minding his tongue at the thread of her life. There is an evident ache in each shift of her spring ribs; shivers upon her back, flushing autumnal.

From her place between his sombre pillars, Aurëwen reaches with her shorn mouth to his, aquiver.

A kiss for his gloom, that which she cannot  (will not, honoring)  glean the reasoning, arrives by way of pale and tissued lips upon his ashen lips and the sickle that is his jaw and the somnolent heather of his cheek. Mouthing with reverence at the cusp of lashes and the fluted, heavy-browed lids, wisping, “Lótotyë órenya quéta nin.” Here, beneath the bleariness of early harvest, Aurëwen would love him, altarless, in manners in which she had only dreamt of as a blooming heiress. In the last lights of summertide, she would give sacrilege; and even then, perhaps she would remain unforgiven.

At this she kept her temple to his, holding a moment which she knows will never come again. She was so weary, so aversive to her moons-laden melancholy; prayed that he might drape his own upon her, instead.

And then, eyes again fluttering shut, ticked downwards with a murmured dubbing of  "Evinyatar,"  Aurëwen has become an unsettled realm once more; unclaimed, uncharted. But his breath upon her ruined face draws a shiver down her spine reminds her that golem he may be, this bone and blood have gentled them.

And, here—
She wreathes with an impending pirouette; shoulders abed his mournful and dark chest; tail notched, feathering; her hips align, weighted into one of either inner heavy thigh. Breath sifting past the momentous something within her breast, the silver awaits Mahler’s ministrations ... what-ever they may be.

foreign, the words she spoke. perhaps to another man they would have been more easily translated. but mahler refused to think of the sablefurred creature that matched aurëwen in her scarred visage. for now there existed only the nature of his torments, and the balming touch of her that drove them away for the present. she was ethereal beneath him, balancing against the hungering whet of his desire, and mahler realized with a sudden and daunting awareness that he wanted to bar her not.
perhaps what he loathed most in aurëwen was her sense of freedom; she was unburdened by obligation, even to her children, and that was the vision in which he saw reflected his own rampant thirst for sanity. the dove was singularly opposite him; where he found enchantment in rote organization and ritual, aurëwen found her heart in the wreathing of the trees, the air, the scent of the loam crushed underfoot.
all wildflower and moon-chased silver; he pressed his muzzle against the back of her neck, moving forward to further encase her in his embrace, to perhaps pursue that freedom he felt limning every line of her enlivened and yielding body. the side of her cheek, the base of her spine, the curve of her hip; mahler explored with a trembling touch, lids at half-mast.
until at last he grasped her in the heat of it, a groan vibrating in his throat on the end of a croon as he found himself within the clasp of some angelic warmth that drove the sighs from him and finally mahler allowed himself to be consumed.

Time dialated; ticked so insolently, so impedimently that it seems to ebb backwards.

In its fathomless depths, Aurëwen, cradled, knows now that she has forever forged on from the girlish, glowing rosiness of moons and moons and moons — forever gone from mind, from heart, for it hadn’t ever truly been love and she no longer wished for it. Instead she wishes to remain gathered in a golem’s arms; it is here where the heiress finds not only freedom evermore but felt the impassioned order that limned hisself; that which she had been so without and now brimmed with.

And with he who was here Aurë is reminded she is promised to only her starlets ... and that no male holds dominion over her. As she endorses the Renewer's laments haven within her giving figure and endless, sanctorium soul, so too does the Undimming profess the tethering which Mahler seeks to marry her with; that which had not kept her grounded since her deliverence of her sun-and-stars.

In his arms alone she went unadrift— 
Her deliverer's croon elicts a primal plaint from betwixt her lungs and throat, made effeminate, faint by the waxen chords. She cannot help how she traces her torn, bottom lip along the corner of his own; how her fair thighs strain, shudder near stone; how she cinches him, bathes him deep within her. Then, without wings, she hews away from him with a parting nudge of pink nose to plum; and when she was breathless entire her breast and belly had cast itself upon the plinth; angular hips held only by the mighteous lock of his own.

She only prays her grayscale will not take ills to such a powerless display of devestation by her impoverishment of intimacy which now possessed her; Aurëwen mantled pink, mortified. Pressed a flushed, scarred cheek to rest her crown upon stone, moonstone eye imprisoned by timorous lashes. She pined for his crowding upon her; to remain pursual of her; to press her into this sacramental tablet with the stygian monolith of his own. Faerie, anchored, fluttering.

Now, gathering her quailing hips into the headiness beneath the golem, she draws her sex almost entirely from him; and only when she feels him glissade against her with each shuddering breath does she torturously, haltingly return him to her. Settles within the crevasse of his own with a drowsy, dreamless quiver once more; and undividedly for Mahler, she wisped a magnanimous, murmured   "I am here,"  stoppering into a muted moan. 

And she, pearlmade claws clutching at crag, argent eye wavering, now watching him from where she lay, Aure echoed the horizoning and reharbouring of her hips a second time. A third time, too, but with lips and figure trembling so thoroughly as she began to wilt — and she flushed high in her shorn cheeks again at her deprivement. How it made her so ... unsteady, so inadequate, when there was nothing more she craved than to shepherd him within her.

Now, all the silver could manage was a gentle rutting; scarce enough to do anything more than guide him into her shallows, but a singular, unending trill leaving her fluted throat all the while. The lean, long muscles shifted within a back she'd forsaken from him; begging to veiled upon, all as she shivers and shakes for him like willow's bough.

;_;

oh, she brought him forth between moments, penning the letters of herself upon the very essence of him. she moved in ways alien to the stalwart man, and wrung from his impassive core the droplets of grief that emerged as low sounds. the mountain shards of his voice held up the fairy-ring of her own. mahler was content to cut off his gaze from the world, steady himself, let aurëwen guide them both down this untrodden hall with a zeal only she could conjure.
he knew it now, and still there were threadings within him that he could not yet let her touch, a tight rein that kept his own movement restrained, somnolent against the lapping waves of her archings. it was akin to the intensity of pain, the strokings of aurëwen's body — mahler rolled his forehead down against the delicate curve of her skull, breath burning through the milkweed fluff of her nape to her flesh as he lowered his chest against the arch of her spine and set her more firmly into the bracket of his hips.
the sylph drew him to herself again, and he heard the threnody of her want silhouetted against the trill of the insects, the lapping of water against the altar upon which she had offered the passionate heat of her rawboned form. it drove him higher; his mouth had gone dry as sand, and he felt himself spinning headlong into the thrumming of heartbeat that throbbed between them.
mahler ground out a guttural cry from where he had tucked himself into her ruff; he covered her with a staccato rush that voyaged him unbearably until he was caught fast and at last felt aurëwen pluck those wooden trembling plaits until they broke and he shattered within her, arms steel 'round her waist and body swept with his own tremouring.

;a;  ♡
love these two so much

He, come to masque as near mortal, descends from hazy heavens—
and perhaps not, for Mahler is as fragmented as she; refractured greyscale and ivory, gentled only in flesh. And beneath his hold she is thusly gathered, the heft of him upon her and the heaviness of him within her; beneath her hide she thinks, misting, he might have bitten therein pomegranate.

Through the halls of shade does she mean to chart some course for him from where-ever in Tártaros had bastilled him in the same manner his heavy thighs entomb her own. So exhaustively melded are they that an arch has been sculpted by the press of his stomach — which only deepens, dimpling the pale vaulting in nectareous woe.

Beneath him and the touch of his brow, Aurëwen is drowning above her waters and would never wish it else. Here, in all of nature’s symphonic quietude, he was hers—
—and as he refigured the summertide silence with his glottal moan Aurëwen can only crescent her waxen throat to the steadied sun; can only let an answering chorus warble from driveled, pomegranate lips. Her lungs flower; cheeks flush, harvest red as the shadowpriest’s dark hips hasten into a dizzying staccato—
—and when the strumming within her figure stutters it is with a wisping, ruined aria which the syren imbathes him so that he may harbor within her brimming depths to the hilt and further.

Tethered to another by myriad and many means, as starlit and stygian descend from euphoria ... the hushed willow-grotto had her cinching about Mahler  Mahler  Mahler. Swan’s neck draped over the edge of altar and she mouths foreign and his name. As he ports unto her each cascade of himself, she barters with softened writhes of fair hips, meant to work him through his listing pleasure.

Heartbeats pass.

It is all she endeavors;
yet regardless of his seal already pressed between them into the wax of her, regardless how her mind begs for reprieve — she is unseeing through the faint dew of ecstasy, of exhaustion trembling within the dark cusp of half-sight. Possessed entirely, savagely, by all her soul felt and sought and it demands once more and that he must cage her and make her quiver.

Lain as his gleaming ophelia who for him would endlessly invite his smothering sorrows. An endless, elysian gallery meant to be thieved.

His to pin and pluck; to conquer the faltering cant of her irregular and strident hips. The golem’s name knells from aching lips, without her own accord, as thin and quiet as a winter hymn. Her greycloaked gaze glistens, ravished, blindly reaching aquiver for his amethyst—

bayonnetted as aurëwen was, mahler listened to her entire flesh croon his name, and found himself galvanized into a more vicious step. she drank from him the vibrancy of all he might give, and yet she was unslaked, flush, melting wax and petal-soft. his teeth at her nape, nipping from behind taut lips as the thrum of armory rose again to knife deeply, more insistently this time.
she was bone-delicate beneath the iron encirclement of his trembling limbs. feet of clay, breath to singe; mahler was wholly remade in the kiln of her thighs, shoved bear beyond what he had formerly believed were his limitations. he found himself half-addled, panting against the silk of aurëwen's cheek as his name spilled in glinting beauty from her lips, driving harshly into the heating yield of her, the angularity of her sharp spine downswept as he gathered her beneath his chest.
the syllables of her rose to his own throat; mahler in this moment was treacherously drawn toward a sort of affection, and though his heart still loathed her actions, and though his pity ran core-deep, aurëwen had awakened in him such myriad sensation that he desired to spark the same in her own spirit, at the hand of himself.
they were not transactional; she gave fully as did he, swathed in desperation and the clanging bells of desire gone long unsated. the diasporan was unmade, an idol in the graceful glow of the dove's favouring clutch. resplendent; a hoarse cry quavering in the narrow space between the jut of her shoulders as savagely he vent himself again.
exhausted, mahler fell numbly to the plinth as soon as he was able. one forepaw trailed in the water; sides rose and fell gulping breaths as for the present the lavender gaze went veiled and he sought control of his ennervated body.

She was wild and fey and much too soon chained about him a second time; warbling, writhing beneath the refigured golem as he rode her against each portion for himself. Voyaging her ruthlessly into the marrow of his storm and Aurëwen was stricken like lightning; smothered, igneous, attempting in vain to ricochet back against the iron hold that all but kept her hips melded motionless at their post. The priest meant for her to remain strewn beneath him and weather him   again  again  again   until a tormented, timid wail winged from her raw throat, again in Mahler.

It was a calling as treacherously timid as when his lips seared her shorn cheek and welted her own name into her skin her blood her soul entire and then he savaged her; brought her to her third meridian with a broken beg ... and the syren was uncaged once more.

But Aurëwen remained.
Remained, with gusts of gale shivering through lungs that made to gobble the air as the silver longed to enact the same upon him. But though her ridden figure hummed at such a figment, she was worn so thoroughly — for now? — and instead mouthed weakly, hushedly, at the plush mauve threshing about his ears. She felt the quivering of her belly at spine; knew the mutual melt upon her thigh; and with only vague reluctance herself did she excuse herself by sneaking a nip to his cheek.

She found no trust in her deadened limbs, and likewise found no purchase upon their acclaimed altar; but the druid, wincing, still trembling, managed to work her way back into the waters all the same. She would bathe herself; wash their mutual mark from her; meander beneath the shy currents — until misted, hooded eyes peered up at him through pondwaters dribbling down her brow, her chin.

Hesitant and befogged, Aurëwen tentatively preened along the arm which trailed up from the lilies.  “I remember who I am with you,”  she murmured, gently worrying at a notched tuft upon his ashen forelimb.  “Who I am, and all that I should have been, should have done ... but can, in time, still do. Still be.”  Not the girlish, too-early mother she had come to be, with remnants of such selfishness and emotion to overwhelm, but ... who Aurëwen truly was at the cornerstone of herself.

Should he look to her, the argent eyes did not waver; and though they glinted with succubic wanting, a more greater and impending selfless, entirely sexless ideal simmered within.  “Would you like to hear ze first, evinyatar?”

flagging though mahler found himself, the feathered press of aurëwen's wet lips to his wrist cascaded a warmth to his loins that settled, rousing him from his carnal stupor. his lavender eyes followed the trajectory of the dove in the water; he was content simply to watch her become a creature of the pond, moving among the lillies as if they were her sisters. 
"tell me," mahler rumbled, unmoving from the stretch of stone as their coiled scents enmeshed themselves within his fur. her mouth moved further along the gargoyle's corded foreleg; he lay back languidly, eyelids half-closed. aurëwen seemed to worship him in this moment, and while this had never happened for him before, the man was content to be still beneath her ministrations.
equally he wished to hear the dove, and hear her again, but there was time enough for the latter. the pressing churn of guilt and grief inched nearer, but with a mental snap of jaws mahler drove it out. soon he would be alone; soon he might feel its full weight, weep again for stigmata.
now — now belonged to mahler and to aurëwen, and though his own need for words was not present, he desired to listen, and perhaps thereby know better the woman he had only judged these past few months, for the very same flightly abandon that had drawn him into an exquisite sundering not once, but twice.

Oh—
he answers within the realms of his own accent, a mere duet of words basking in the hooded alchemy of amethyst eyes. Though Aurëwen nods, as she falters beneath the limpid, languid gleam she so nearly forgets what it is she nods to; she wouldn’t ever fathom the language by his ashlar tongue, but greeds mightily in hearing it again. Hearing him, and hearing him—

“An establishment of mine own, where ze waves kiss ze sea. Though a following for ze sake of upholding its foundations I am without, I ... I long for a realm of reason and of education.”  Shy, shorn cheek bedding into the crook of his heather elbow, now,  “Whatever ze world we live in is, there are many children. All ze more to teach, and to give our endless learnings to. Until I atone for ze wrong-doings I have had my own suffer through, I will never again birth another.”  And never again will I give myself so imprudently and without love!  Half-sight refractured; argent tempered despite such soft, somnolent words. Despite how confessional her hushed chords were, when such delectability had occured.

With a tender, tormented sigh, Aurëwen nudged her rubied, worn crown beneath the priests’ gnarled bough of limb — pressing a gentled and groaning gnaw into bicep — before finally rising from the waters. Anchored now into a narrow hip:  “My realm by ze sea, it ... no, it is my atonement. I would wish for ze nurturing of all who came there, as most seats do. New, old,”  but with weakening gall noted his mauve maw so near to waxen thighs,  “And yet ...”  and yet, each murmur of molten breath slowly, achingly made her purpose soot. Even as she considered such an ascent by the sea, her melted mind had her consider another — the dark mouth being there.

Not entirely a sexless ideal, then.
Heavens.

Spring ribs restful at his shaded shoulder; a breath meant to steady herself instead came out a little uneven. And so  (rather foolishly, perhaps)  the silver let her own eyes veil close. Turned her once-lovely features from Mahler; tried to speak.  “I am unsure of when such a figment will ... will come to fruition. But I know that it is mine.” 

Hers — like the sounds she made him make because of what she did to him yes, his moans were hers and
he was hers and she his and her muse, in the elysian gallery of her he was her muse and
hers, hers! and
another insects’ trill in the same shivering breath. 

“I swear myself to it,”  she then tried — but it was with a tongue laden with that same, sudden, shy voicelessness.  “I ...”

here now the inner murmurings of a heart he might not have touched had he not touched her — mahler felt the worship of her stirring again; her sodden crown nudging against him briefly until the dove settled her slight weight upon the heavy breadth of his body. the vibrations of her continued words jutted through his ribcage, made his silence all the more thoughtful.
her ideals aligned in many ways with those he sought to succeed in diaspora, and for the first time since their interlude, mahler thought of the pack he had inherited from his late brother. takiyok, then, would become his second — hang what any might think of it. the winterwhite deserved the rank, and more.
but beyond the logistic aspect of leadership,  aurëwen suggested that there was more to such things, a delicate nuance that might be achievable if only he shared her hope, a fluted thing that had always before escaped the shadowpriest. he lay beneath her as if carved from the very same stone of the plinth upon which they both rested, and considered what she had spoken.
"if there is anyvone who could accomplish such things, it vould be you, aurëwen," mahler murmured, reaching up to trace his teeth through the pale ivory tresses of her shoulder.
suddenly quite vulnerable, feeling as though it were more than his body she had exposed this day, he closed his eyes, and spoke no more. his mind leapt with questions, but the gargoyle found it more prudent to hold them back, allow them the pleasure of their silken existence at present.

"Th- ...thank you."
His lips made her so faint; but it was the words which made her so featherlight, and as he imprinted them into her skin her own breath went from her, unbidden, taken. And though she never thought to voice such graciousness:  "Thank you for seeing all of me."  As Mahler set in his teeth, kept his eyes from her — how glad she was!  (in such a breathless, benevolent manner)  — for would that they open, the priest might know now the indescribable enchantment upon the once-heiress’ pillaged features.

When last had another held such a faith in her as she once would for they? Looked upon her soul as they looked upon her face? ​By draping a fair limb to cradle his ribs, would he know the hum of this unimmune glass thing within her breast? Aurëwen, a low sigh of surrender swaying from deep in her figure, let her hewn brow rest against that dark jaw. 

With his devastation of her entire, it might have very well been a tremble of his name; and so, silver held the priest to her as if he were a precious breath for he was so
beautiful
and she does not think she has ever thought as much of another but she wants to devour him and she does in insatiably ravenous nips to that mouth. The pink nose dusting at the prominent feathering of his cheek-bones; torn lips trembling at his drawn brow and at the knit she finds there and finally pressing a kiss of her own to the corner of indomitable lips.

A timid laving at the line of his throat brought with it the rhythmic ebb of her gaunt form against his; more patient than their commencement as she made sure to work with the steadied waves that lapped at the altar; swaying his arms, sensual, slow.

For a moment, as she drew away to gaze with tendered abandon into his mauve face, airgetlám was foolishly, foolishly affrighted that he might not wish for her — would be warded from her shorn features, her gaunt figure, the coveted and voluptuous vitality she had ever been without. ... But then Aurëwen cloaked her half-sight once more with a shivering-out of her ruff; lent her crown back, and bared a long-throated fragility to the male before her.

Spectacle in itself of her own vulnerability and the trust therein for him to trace, too.

And yet her need was now not only of desolation, but sighing and seeking for him should he long for her so, too.  "I am here,"  was the whisper and his name; both entreaty again and now grace, for him and his sorrows and delicacy she now beheld of him; an almost reverent disbelief daubed upon her face. This was not fiction for the first time.

such a thing, love; such a thing, touch. he had both; he had nothing. she churned, the desire to be swallowed by his gloaming apparent in the scarred countenance for which mahler found a singular sort of charred adoration. ah! what a fool! to have chosen a fool! and yet she was not, only a smitten seraph, too groundless and recherché for the world. for his world, the gargoyle thought with an upheaval of breast, hephaestus readying the anvil to mold yielding aurëwen yet again.
"vone vould be stupid not to look," he murmured, drunk upon the poured-cream column of her throat. what was this sensation — she fit not into his existence. there was no place for a dove within the forge that drove the shadowpriest, and yet she whittled away at him all the same, waters against the stone of his resistance.
here, indeed, and he had lost himself. if ere there was magick in the world, mahler felt she would be it: a fairy come from some enchanted weald to wend her spare and elegant limbs round him and draw him from the cold realm of the living to a place altogether warm and rife with a splendor he could almost not bear to taste again.
what was the name for such a thing ... ! ah! the vibration of his throat silenced his own words, drove them from the battlefield of his tongue, which swept now along the pulse of aurëwen's life, hot with a throbbing blood that he was sure was specific only to the dove herself.
what was it she wished? diaspora was the core of him. mahler could not run down the path she revealed, and yet some feral wildling thing gnashed its teeth and wished only that he might.

And here be Aphrodite, come again to favor the smoldering lock of her smith’s arms; and rather than return to the foam from whence she was born she wished to thaw here and beneath he who would remake her again and again and again and 
—she was no goddess. But she felt beautiful, here, in a way she had never let herself believe. 

Her heart was not immune, nevermind their amorous anguish; she would never entreat to the stygian in awaying with her; to meet amongst the mists and devour another the way she so aches for him to. Aurëwen was wild and fey and now sang with a siren’s longing laughter at her golem’s indulgence; a strangeling who could now no longer leave the forge of he before her; knowing that this deepening day might be their first, their last.

She could only guide him further into whatever depths these hours left them with.

The knowing of such made her tremble at his tongue, made her vague, visionary,  “Where else would you like to look?”  more a moan than musing enquiry, and yet a most rare smile of blest captivation now unsheathed upon slit lips, unbidden and rightly of Mahler’s own hand.  “Where else would you like to taste?”  Swan’s neck only lent further into those teeth, and the quivering within her thighs and now in her belly-breaths were twinned. Ever more kept to the earth, if only at the price of wearing away he who is responsible for her grounding ... but she would like to think that her priest is not hateful of this payment.

Perhaps he might favor it as she favors the plinth beneath them; in the way the siren drapes her arms about his heather shoulders and heaves him, headily, to rise above her as she rests upon the anvil below. Perhaps he might look into the argent glimmer of her ruined eyes and see that she would ... O!  “Bewitched me,”  she lulled with bitten lips, ever when she longed for his own,  “You have bewitched me—”  in body, in soul; lain and gentled, wax already, even as her words might have been better suited in the reverse: she did not yet know how much she herself, to Mahler’s consideration, seemed the enthraller.

And so the impish strain of her gaunt hips beckoned; the smile now ravening, rapturous as she nuzzled her desecrated temple into his wrist ... and then, for she could await no longer, bit in a kiss there with a sweetened sigh.

Would ever a name be given for the nature of sweet nothings between them?