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If I wore my soul as skin, stretched across flesh and bone like a living shield, I would have been covered in scars from head to toe.
How fascinating, beauty created by the echo of pain, etched into your flesh as if it was a canvas. Simply breathtaking. It suits you.”
“You are like them, River. You need darkness’ claim to unleash your incandescent brilliance.”
“I want to slice open your skull right here. I want to saw through that delicate, white bone, stain it red to pull your most intimate, secret thoughts from that gorgeous brain.”
“After baring myself to you so intimately … I cannot stop fearing that you will leave me.” He tilted his gaze toward me, eyes icy-blue. “Are you going to leave me, River?”
“It is common to close one’s eyes to the truth when a glimpse of it would bring endless suffering with no hope of relief.”
“But how do you heal when old wounds are torn open again and again, building into festering sores on your soul, poisoning your every thought? When people hurt you until you start to think you deserve their abuse?”
No one had ever acknowledged that every day was a fight. That every day I convinced myself to stay alive was a victory.
Some things were worth bleeding for.
“And if you long for pain again, if you crave death’s touch …”
“You will not harm yourself. You will come to me, and I will fulfill your darkest desires. You will find relief only at my hands. Is that understood, River?”
“Because I could never create a being as sublime
as you. Everything about you is utter, incomparable perfection.”
“I love how you bleed for me, River.”
Tonight, you are mine. Tonight, I own you. All of you.”
“Like freedom. Like salvation.”
“There was a development I did not anticipate. An unexpected miscalculation. I was not supposed to mean the tender things I said to you, my umbral rose. I was not supposed to fall. But by the Gods, I did.”
“I am not your reaper, River. Your grave is not here.”
And if you long for pain again, if you crave death’s touch … You will not harm yourself. You will come to me, and I will fulfill your darkest desires. You will find relief only at my hands.
“I have craved and loved death all my life. Its shadow touched my heart from a young age, the echo of its steps following me on every winding path.” I wiped over my eyes, chuckling. “And now I love death personified … Now I love you. You have shown me that there is happiness in darkness. Now I have something worth dying for. Someone worth dying for.” Bang.
“I am sorry, River … I am sorry I could not protect you as you deserved. Your death is my heaviest sin.”
All I need now is you. We can build another house. Plant another garden. Because you, my umbral rose, are my future.”
“Perhaps this is for the best. A single, mortal lifetime could never have been enough for our love, my umbral rose.”
Ours was a love for eternity. A bond not just skin deep but rooted in my marrow and anchored in my blood. A sweet, lethal malediction. Ours was a love like gilded bones. Macabre and rare, but all the more precious for it.
