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The days all come the same, now. An endless twilight stretched unbroken from the moment the knife pierced your heart.
Once, you beheld beauty. Honeyed rays of gold and sunlight dancing on olive skin, the sacred and the profane balanced on a blade’s edge. The memory of grace sustains you long after the thorns choke the light from your eyes, but even memory falters and fails, and you lose your way in the dark.
Your armor grows heavy as the flesh beneath it withers to bone, painful everywhere it presses against the writhing vines below. When you can bear the load no longer, you strip it away. You remake yourself, cut free the stranger clasped to your chest and replace him with golden scales, lashed in place with timeworn cloth, red as lifesblood. He stares up at you from the dirt, a betrayal cast into his silver features you’re certain you haven’t earned.
You leave him behind.
You’ve become everything you once hated, the disease you tried to eradicate. Still, you cleave to your purpose. Through blood or guile, the witch took everything from you. Your love, your guidance, your very life, corrupted. A mockery. As long as she yet draws breath, you must remain.
Your sword burns in your hands now. A radiant and righteous weapon, trying to rid the world of its master. You swear—to something, some bright and terrible force that defies your understanding—that you’ll fall on it when this is over. A true death, if such a thing is even possible.
You stray further from the light, venture deeper into the low places, where water meets shallow roots and twisted corpses reach up for a long-forgotten sky. The longer you journey, the more death’s touch surrounds you: howling black shades, forgotten warriors riddled with vines, stripped of their flesh and their minds alike, blighted creatures with lamp-light eyes scuttling through the dark. You cut them down in turn without mercy or remorse, heedless that each time you fall, a little less of you returns.
The last thing you lose is your anger.
This shade was different than the others, threw himself into the fight not with desperation, but cunning. Your sword felt sluggish in your hands, entangled in your vines even as it scorched their thorns, and his danced so easily against it. It seemed as if the very stars had been pulled from their orbit to crash against your broken armor, guided by his clever hand. You fought with everything you had, everything left of you—so close now, you had to be—and you lost.
When you wake again, your hands are empty, your weapon cast aside.
The shade is still watching you, alien and beautiful, with a sorrow in his eyes you cannot comprehend. He makes no move to harm you, and you can see no good reason to provoke him. The pain is gone now, replaced with a hollowed-out emptiness that your dull curiosity can barely illuminate.
“Is it really you?” is all he asks.
You have no answer for him—your throat long since smothered by thorns and torn asunder—until he cups the edge of your mask, dented and tarnished, in his shimmering hand, and an unfamiliar warmth blooms at the back of your ribs. It must be. You must be.
His face falls when you incline your head, and what little remains of your ravaged heart falls with it.
“I’m so sorry, my—my friend,” he seems to right himself. “I fear I was too late for both of us.”
Without thinking, you reach out, pleased to find him solid under your hand. The heat of skin against skin is lost to you, the blood-rush hunger faded even from memory, but for where you are, for what you are, this is enough. There’s power here, coiling through your vines like the echo of a heartbeat, and contentment, too, settling deep within your weathered bones.
“Will you stay, then?” the shade seems to pluck the question from your swirling thoughts.
You came to this cavern looking for someone. It was important, you know, even if you can’t quite seem to remember why. You found him, though, did you not? You found him, and finally you can lay your weary spirit to rest.
The days all come the same, now. An endless night twined in a lover’s embrace from the moment you sank into the tangled roots, the fireflies glittering above you like stars.