Noctisardor Bypass ich muss dir sagen

mahler was suddenly dizzy with relief and chagrin: he saw the edges of her figure tense into steel and silver. and while he had wanted them to sit among the flowers, all he managed to do for a moment was stare down at the ones he had dropped between them.
blue blurring into rose-edge; suddenly it was his own gaze blurring, and he fought for the waterline beneath stoneflower eyes to be dried, to be empty, when he lifted his head to look at her again. and as it had always been, mahler saw settlement when he looked at wylla. peace, despite all. the one-time promise of an eden he had razed with the fire of his pride and destroyed for them both; and even beneath the way he had tormented her she still smote him with the essential and very pristine refusal to exist on any terms but her own. 
as she always had.
 mahler suddenly felt the spear-point of grief lodging terribly just beneath his breastbone, palpably, tangibly painful.
"i am dying, i think."
the words hung like spiderwebbed glass on the inside of his arteries; the moment he felt them cut from his throat, mahler wanted very badly to take them back. "i am telling you because — i know you are here for phaedra, and she is of an age to go vith you vhen — or now. she may not vant to stay, i — cannot see her staying."
ah — he was stumbling again, and shut his mouth hard so that the great muscle beneath his jawline leapt, and stared down with nausea spreading faster and faster until it felt he might faint, or be faint, or in any way waver.
and then there was nothing else to say.