He had no name before her. He was only The Hollow—a kingdom of silence and cold. His dominion was that of dead stones adrift in black seas, worlds of ice and dust circling without purpose throughout time. Sparse in his emptiness. His was a vacancy he scarcely noticed, for it was all he had ever known.
Then she came—the Light. She called him Umbriel, and something in the naming settled deep within him. It was welcome. It was substantive, a weight and presence Umbriel had never known as The Hollow. She herself was called by many names: Zaria, Elanor, Soleil, Aurora. She was dawn and fire, radiance and breath. The light always behind him, the warmth for every shadow he cast.
Where she touched, his barren spheres quickened. Frozen rock melted to rivers, winds began to stir, her very breath carried life into being. Before her, he had been a wound of untold depth. But recognition of her existence cut open his night, and through the fractures her brilliance poured—spilling stars across his body, scattering diamonds in the abyss.
He could not abandon what he was; he was darkness, and always would be. Yet neither could he refuse her space within him. They did not diminish one another. They balanced. Between them, the universe blossomed: his silence and her song, his void and her fire. She brought color to the dark without banishing it, and in return he gave her a boundless canvas, a place to root and bloom.
And they themselves were changed by the other. She found rest in his cool embrace, a calm no flame could offer. He found warmth in her radiance, a glow no shadow could contain. He was the breeze across her summer day; she, the hearth against his frozen heart.
She did not end him; she completed him. He did not bury her; he held her. They felt gratitude, one for the other: not for what they created, but for what they became. That is how all life exists—between the two. Not only in the stars and rivers, but in the quiet wonder of their eternal walk, hand in hand, content in a relationship no force could unmake.
