Northstar Vale zwilling

set for tomorrow evening <3

upon parting ways with hydra, mahler assured himself, squared his shoulders with the air of a visiting doktor straightening his vest before walking directly into an operating theatre.
he entered the sunspire and came down upon the vale in a direction that placed it upon his way back to diaspora.
no flowers to be found this time of year, save for the glistening snowdrop, and he smartly marched to @Andraste's doorstep with a bouquet of them held carefully within his jaws.
he set it down, called gently for the fairy-queen, and then took up his burden again. not expecting to be well-received, mahler knew the importance of making his amends if future planning was not to be interrupted.

Sickening instinct dread;
it pockmarks her innards; creaks with an old and corrupted throat; the murkbreath of it churns the delicacy of her stomach over itself; tightens in her arid throat as her rosy nostrils pinch and flare in the half-panicked furling that is absolute aversion. She does not wish to see this one who has bit into her wavering heart but he has called, he has called! He has called and as ever the will of Undómiel is undone, desolate, devotional; lungs hitching, made to weave her way by evendim. The quiver was not entirely of nipping frost;
striding ever up through foothill and drifts, as before; assumes some guise of airy impassivity and cannot glean if he would pierce through that thin mothwing veiling. Disruption is an uninvited, unwanted, unwelcome bedfellow; despondency is a cooing lover, mouthing mournful upon hip; her very soul quails damp of this fetid horror; this uncertainty for she is only
dust!

Phlegmatic mondmädchen looks upon musiker and speaks not.

he had known, had loved andraste far too long not to note her unfurling, the melancholy that clung to her mien down to the very gait. solemnly he lay down his bundle of snowdrops, wincing inwardly to recall the last thing he had said to her.
"i vas cruel, andraste," mahler rolled from his chest with apology coloring the syllables. he was genuine in his attendance of her, chastised and chased with guilt.
what remained between them would soon be revealed, but mahler would not allow himself to fill the space with hate during the waiting.
her shroud of quietude was flung round her slender shoulders; in his mind she was aurëwen, but now it was a cool regent who had deigned to spare him an audience.

She fragments, now;
Lips stiff and numb with the crowding cold. Nieninquë,  noted a small, detached voice within the midpoint of her mind; the one wisping, as though making notes of clinical record:  He has come to seek forgiveness. Speak, and show him that you were never furious. Let him know of your faith.  But Andraste has gone fragile and faraway; glinting northron spire; she is shrieking inside, thrashing fearful and feral against the anguish so evident upon the grimace of him. Cobwebbed lips pluck themselves apart; cottonmouthed, warbling weak, so weak, dust in throat,
“Yes.”

Cruel, even now! cries the creature within her, faltering; and altogether Andraste aches to only reach for her golem and to wend her arms ‘round those heaving shoulders with a remedial touch that is not, for once, lurid; to hold him to her and her to him with only the purest of passions;
he knows all that writhes within her  (he has always known)  and her lunejaw is wound; affrighted of herself, and how hidden they had kept themselves of another.  Mahler, Mahler  —
the wars of him; all that he has wreaked within her. Suffocating; stifled. Yielding mold to what-ever he wished of her; but she would not unleash some queenswrath upon that pleading head. No matter her balking.

the aching rift between them grew to yawn with her single utterance; mahler saw the futility of his mission. but it was not andraste he chastised — it was himself.
had he come sooner, or with more aplomb; if only he had not said such hateful and cold things; if he has held fast and not allowed himself to be goaded by her righteous anger.
if he could love, and properly, to meet aurëwen upon the plane for which she longed —
the measure of mahler's failing came to mount and mount and rise until at long last he dropped his eyes and gave a great sigh.
andraste, for whom he had pined and sweat and cried, for whom in the end he had crafted the epithet of dust.
how horrible in his brutality had he been in the face of her love.

Saltglint, in this unending silence;
bidden by the knowledge that again again again she had enlisted her ailing heart to one who would not proffer his own; that she was not this singular other; perchance would not ever be. Each breath that had been shared upon plinth and within serpent’s lair; those moons that she had promised herself to him without even her knowing: who is this before her? This golem that she has reawakened? He who sighs heavy, knelt before her; she does not know she does not know she does not know and
“You,”  hitching breaths,  “you once said that you would not blame me, if I did not wish to give you my womb,”  blinking ridiculous and shivering the tears that rivulet as molasses down cold, waxen cheeks; stifling.  “I agreed, for I was in love; for I so assumed that from such a making, our children would be singular from all those others. Heavens, I was ever enchanted—!”  chords fracturing; revelation,  “I would have given you an Astarte— yes! Astarte! Ours, my love! You were my heart’s blood. Ze breath in my lungs. How could I not ever name our bairn so, when—”
and here she faltered entire; rubied crown come to hang off-kilter from shuddering shoulders; wearied, fluted neck, “It would have all been for you, mein herz,” features churning with anguish, agony, at the tearing of her soul burning, searing, ruthless with the unraveling from his; their ending.

“But I cannot again mother, lest there e’er be—”
ze love that I deserve.

it was not to be.
andraste uttered, and from the first he knew, as he had felt ketzia fully cool against him the night she had guided him through fever.
where had she gone?
but now, now, now —
the first planning of his life jerked aside, future sundered with her crystal tears and the anguish of the tearing he felt in his breast.
he saw then the dire way in which he had ravaged her spirit, allowing her to believe that love reined true beyond obligation, for the simple fact that she had spun out of him sensations never before experienced.
and so smitten he had mistaken it for love; for it was in its own way, as was all depth of such feeling. mahler cursed himself, lilac gaze fracturing with a stab of his own pain.
he had not granted the dove an honesty he had given takiyok. and therein he believed was the tragedy of diaspora's first; and here mahler stood having repeated the transgression.
head swam; the gargoyle might have reached for her, had not — astarte.
the name was flung into his awareness; mahler's eyes cleared as he carefully suspended his sorrow and stared upon andraste.
beautiful astarte; she had been the golden-tipped child come second from marigold, preceded and followed by a pair of brothers.
her laughter a pure belling; he had loved her with a sacredness of spirit always reserved for a daughter. 
it was astarte who had died first of his children; he had gathered her against his grieving chest and lowered muzzle to tiny ribcage, her last breath a splintering of his spirit.
marigold then; fevered, ready to follow her child off into a land mahler could not walk.
astarte.
he had heard no more spoken beyond the name; the gargoyle tasted salt and realized that noiseless tears had begun to cut swathes through the sable fur of his scarred muzzle.
no words came to this throat; for the first time in his life, mahler had no idea of how to respond when the cruelty of his child forcibly exhumed cast its claws into all his senses.

Utter such a name, she would; scorn him for those grevious, past tidings, she would not.

With the silence that she had struck upon him, the quieted weeping that had befallen them both; that tremulous terror of all that they had wrought together, woven into another; lungs of cotton — Andraste cannot speak any-more through the saltglint upon shorn and numbed lips. A more severe female might have draw herself to whatever heights (that she herself would never have hopes of reaching), and have stared and stared and stared upon this far-fallen male with piteous insolence. A more separate-hearted female might have ne’er expressed these terms; might have indulged with indifference for the sole duty for her people. A more gluttonous woman might have reached for him, risking the fangs and heartkeen of woeful wrath;
but Andraste was neither embodiment; and nor would she enact such towards this General, this Mahler; this male who had broken her yeilding giving foolish gleaming heart with untruths.

Faded sobs gobbling up cold throat; frenzied with fragility; she could no more bear the figment of his impolitic drapery o’er others, as once and first she had not ever cared for  —  'til now, at their end, their faux flame  —  “I will not again give life to a living without love,”  nevermind his deafness; she rises, stilted, jilted;
pray that he proffer the nieninquë to the woman who she would not ever be.  “P-pass auf die türme auf, mein herz,”  turns from Mahler, prompt; fairylight with a quivering step that drew her from the premises  —  and further, lest she be halted.

soured; bitter; wormwood.
upon her taking of aurëwen from his lips, mahler had known it sundered.
he was charged by ownership of his faults; he had been ready to articulate his faults upon her wilting ear, had not she dragged astarte from the grave.
mahler saw then; heart unto stone. she would remake what she had abandoned, and sought his blood for the blighting.
there was no desire within mahler alive now to stop andraste,
never again aurëwen, whom he had whelped and later adored upon proud moonspear, worshipped with all of himself —
lip curled silently as she tore herself from him, sun from earth; and though he felt agony at the ripping, a deep cracking of the soulshard dedicated in completion to andraste, mahler found it incomprehensible to remember how she had been in the beginning.
not with his poor dead entlein hovering shadelike and shivering between them then;
not when she had turned aside and forbade him her name;
not when the promise of children carried with it now the blatant inkspill of their co-mingled and unfruitful desires.
roused from his stillness, mahler at last turned and glanced to the sentinels, impassive as he bid a final farewell unto courtfall and its queen.