Sawtooth Spire Wanna believe, wanna believe that you don't have a bad bone in your body

mahler had endured her scorn, her hate, her wrath, her ire, her bite, but he could not stomach what came last.
the ironbar stripped, idled; shifted — something deep inside mahler cracked. it was not that he deserved no part of wylla's words. it was that mahler finally met the end of his chain in her choked epithet; he was filled with a man's shame for being too weak, in any regard, but the greater part of it was that he could simply bear it no longer.
a spiderwebbing of fractals across the plain-ice fields of his heart. titanic plates shoved along the edges of one another, crushed a new spire-reach of iron mountains across the stitching that had woven his soul to her own.
mahler said nothing, for wylla had said it all. he had no rebuttal and no fight; it leached out of him like poison sucked from a new wound with a reed, spat hastily into the mud alongside one's foot. 
an undeniable aching, but mahler cut it coldly off with an inner hammer's-thud of the forge and the anvil, soldering that edge in him which wylla had melted with the passion of her being. clanging of the blacksmithy beating sparks from that weakened point of his soul until it was cool, dashed with a tepid water, oiled with the final sense of his own grief.
he did not look at her, his attention spent in a feral way toward the sudden juddering of green-feathered leaves, awareness suggesting it was unfortunately a small pitcher with big ears that had gotten too large a glassful of the bile between them.
a slow, pained blink, and the gargoyle opened his wearied, cold stare upon wylla at last. she shook with tears, and there was the fading tremble in his breast that whispered he must try again, that he must go to her.
this time the shadowpriest ignored the glissade; he closed the gates with finality around his stoneworked features, latching them from within. "i go back to searching for thade," was all he said, before his large self shifted toward the way he had come.
mahler did not expect her to stop him, but waited for it all the same, dark ears cupped forward toward his chosen path.