Altar of Twilight andächtig

i could have loved you
pain chased its way up his jawline, until it trembled into nothing along the bulb of his ear.
mahler looked away over the landscape, over the stretch of snow, away from nyx and the way her eyes filled with a thousand things he could not answer.
he had not kept her from coming here to moonspear, or begged that she leave their daughters behind.
and thought mahler felt always that he had been true to his word, and nyx to her own in their understanding of what a contract was, it had ceased to be that. 
he dragged the lilac of his stare back to woman who had laid bare her heart — again — and remembered what he had told wylla the night she had said that she would leave sagtannet.
he had not stopped her either.
"it is not something i deserve," he cautioned in a hoarse whisper. mahler wanted to lie, to throw all things aside and tell the goldmade shadow of his own love. for it would be a lie. not that he loved nyx in his own way, only that it was not the feverish chaos of the sensations wylla engendered in him.
unpolished and unabated; it would not have been fair to nyx, he believed, wielding a sense of justice as one would might a weapon,
to promise her that she could do the same for him;
only hurt in the end for those who loved mahler. and death.
"you have nothing for which to be sorry, nyx," mahler breathed, "only i." lavender gaze seeking for her own as she had done for his, a step shifting him closer though he helplessly did not dare to reach out after what had been spoken.