Cedar Sweep Deep within you til you will not want me any other way

By the riverside her footsteps slowed to a prancing halt, chin tilted back over her shoulder to lock eyes with her shadow (@Makan). Here the trees thinned and the water whispered — and now the light behind her ametrine eyes darkened to something like hunger. Something that invited him to end his hunt.

Alara swept around to meet the shadow at her back. Around them, the forest fell into gloom, abandoned by the setting sun. She didn't mind it so much; Sea-Snakes were born into the dark, before all else.

And perhaps her shadow would feel more at home among his kin.

In the shadows, he was just another one of them. Melted into the dead sun and the fall trees that mimicked his limbs. He could have been born from this moment for all he replicated it in his own body.

Only the deep blue of his eyes gave him away as not being one with the shadows.

They were too richly colored to be described as the waters of the land but too bright still to be a night sky.

It wasn't him that mattered though. It was her and how the hunt seemed to come to some kind of close. Oh, would it ever truly end? Never in full, but in this moment he weaved around the dark bases of trees full of shadows.

When close enough he reached towards her. Entirely uncertain what he would do if he ever met the mark.

Lmk if the powerplay isn't okay <3

He never would meet his mark.

She met him first — not with teeth bared but arms seeking to wind around him, to pierce through the shadowy flesh of him and draw out the deepest most secret pieces for herself. Alara shuddered softly at the warmth of touch, a foreign thing after so many months. Soft, breathing, alive.

Not a shadow at all but a man.

Not a ghost at all but a woman.

Was she weeping?

<3

She controlled the hunt.

She controlled him.

What had once been a ghost was warm against him. Flesh and blood, a heartbeat buried within there. He wanted to latch his teeth around her heart. He could guard it if it rested between his jaws.

Her between his arms would have to be enough.

A deep sound was strummed beneath the scar tissue of his neck.

For a time her tears fell, and she only stayed there, perhaps searching for what she'd lost so long ago in his embrace. You can never come back. Did her shadow know what lost treasure he'd found?

A wayward Sea-Snake; a rare, sad thing. A wrong thing. A thing destined to end in tragedy.

At times she still tasted the salt of the sea.

Alara did not know how much time had passed when she finally spoke. Do you know the way to the sea? Her voice was thin and wavering with disuse, but still beautiful, she noted silently with some small vain pleasure at the fact. A siren might lose her home, but never her voice. Never that.

He could not say he ever took pleasure in tears, but he found there would always be something rare and treasurable in being the one to see them fall.

He would have watched it forever. He would have made constellations of her tears, named each one after a star and used them like a map.

The world was darkness only when her voice reached his ears. A good listener, it was nearly all he had going for him.

And her voice deserved to never be spoken over, only listened to.

He could not speak but something rose within his throat as a sound. Basic and primal, but how badly he hoped she would understand. I will find it. His hunt could be for more than just — this.

@Alara maybe a spree? <3

I didn't see the tag omg kicks my notifs

No words met her, no, only a throated sound that seemed to graze itself faint and shivering over the curve of her spine. She pressed closer, feeling it dance along her ribs now; up and up and swelling into her sternum and filling her throat.

A siren's song, with his as the first note. Quietly Alara sang for him in the nameless language of Sea-Snakes; of river-witches and saltblood mystics, of moon-watchers and wave-dancers, of the ancient rolling motion of the sea always weaving this story anew.

And she too hoped that he would understand.

He would make an ocean for her if it was asked of him.

Or maybe it did not need to be asked. Maybe he simply...would. Dig into the earth until a well was hit and then dig until he was overcome by it all. Until the water reached mountaintops and she had as much sea as she could ever hope for.

No one needed to speak to be understood, he believed that.

His nose sought for where her pulse should be, to feel it thrum beneath her song. He wondered if her blood was saltwater.

His teeth wanting to nibble upon that pulse — only if she'd allow — as if he might taste divinity.

Would it scare her? Would it scare him if he felt it?

She was not his to hold.

The blood of witches was never meant for his tongue, but she would let him taste the scent of it. Let him linger a moment at the shores of the unknowable, reaching for those fathomless depths as if he might ever truly see them. But these things were never made for his eyes, these horrors and wonders reflected in her own.

Her song ebbed like the tide to a hum, and then to nothing. The tears had all been wrung from her, the taste of salt a new grief in itself. How could she be so far from her precious shores? How could she live this way?

Perhaps the secret was that she wasn't alive at all.

If you take me to the sea, Whispered, wavering; the ancient words a Sea-Snake should never speak, not again, not again, and yet — If you take me there, I do vow that my children and my children's children should never leave yours; that their magick will belong always to your blood, as will mine. By the moon and sea, I do vow.

Servitude: the fate of their proud bloodline, again and again. Alara trembled. She hated herself. She wanted this. She hated that she wanted this.

What was this?

Vows, vows, vows. Maybe divinity was not a taste he could handle. Too rich for his blood and too full of things beyond him. It was electricity running through him and sparks for blood cells.

What did he say?

Nothing, he couldn't! Even if he had been a poet there would be no way for him to say these things to her — or to ask after her own things.

There was only silent acceptance of these words...this vow.

Nothing to lose and a whole world to gain.

fade? <3