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

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.