his head is ringing—no, not ringing, splitting. the sound is too full to belong to one bell or one shrine or one ruin. voices overlap in the hollow of his skull until each one wears the shape of his name. a woman’s softness—arthur ?? a man’s old, stern concern—arthur, what is happening ?? something lower beneath them both, a demon’s whisper or the dark learning how to speak kindly: you are coming apart. you cannot be everywhere at once.

the brown of his eyes stirs. then burns.

gold spills through the iris in a sudden, blinding bloom. arthur sees flame. not one flame—all of it. the fire at the shrine, ringed in ash and thrones. the old stone by the fallen giants, wind pulling at a cloak that is and is not his. the shape of a castle gone hollow around its king. here, too—here most of all—swamp-stench and singed cloth, kind hands, the rough warmth of a pyromancer close enough to touch.

‘ arthur. ’ closer this time. beside him.

his soul is burning.

heart thuds in its fleshy cage, alive and spluttering despite itself. he gasps and reaches before the rest of him understands the motion, fingers catching hard around laurentius’ arm. balance. warmth. presence. the world lurches beneath his feet, and for one awful breath he is in too many places to belong to any of them. the corpse of astora with ash on her tongue and a name wearing thin. drangleic’s long shadow dragging after him, crown heavy with rot and memory. hollowing made flesh, kneeling in firelight while a pyromancer says his name like it might still be enough to save him.

slipping, he thinks. he is slipping.

he cannot leave yet. he cannot leave. not when he has only just remembered what it feels like to be wanted somewhere. “ laur— ” the name breaks in his mouth. warmth. there. there.

he hones in on it like air for the drowning, like a hand through fog, like a bonfire he has crawled toward on broken knees without knowing he was praying. laurentius looks down at him and arthur cannot breathe through the tenderness of it. cannot survive another world trying to take him by the throat. cannot bear the thought of becoming one more echo in one more age where he loved too late and left too soon.

so he reaches.

brazenly. desperately. perhaps already half-lost to the yearning in his chest. his other hand catches in cloth and pulls the man down, and arthur kisses him hard and quick, stealing the breath from his lungs to fuel his own.

here.

here.

here.

the visions shudder. the shrine dims. the giants fall quiet. the king in the dark turns his face away. for one suspended heartbeat, there is only laurentius’ mouth, the rough warmth of him, the proof of a body in front of him and not memory, not prophecy, not another cursed version of himself bleeding through time.

when they break, arthur is gasping.

his forehead leans against the pyromancer’s, trembling with the effort of remaining. the gold in his eyes gutters like a flame starved of air, bright and frightened and finally, finally dimming back toward brown. his fingers do not let go.

   The earth itself is pockmarked. Lucatiel touches fingertips to the edge of the decaying skin consuming her eye. Drangleic reeks of corruption and curses.

   Though that may be the toxic gas rising from the ground.

   "Mining something, perhaps," the stone seller said, sounding bored, "What that is I couldn't tell you. Nothing at all, perhaps. The laborers are all undead, moving on muscle memory alone. Well, if they dig up something interesting, let me know?"

   Lucatiel wonders how she'd react if she took off her mask. Blubbering embarrassment? Seems unlikely. She gave the impression of having rocks for brains.

She had given too much again.

It was always thus. No measured charity, no careful husbandry of the self, as though her veins were chalices forever brimming. It had been a lavish, ruinous offering. In its wake, the world swam in a thin, pearlescent haze, her limbs becoming languid, unfaithful things.

The chamber smelled of iron and incense.

Blood and sanctity, wedded as ever.

Anri scarcely recalled how she had come to sit, whether she had been guided there. Only that Laurentius was near, that he permitted her to slump against him.

That constant, unignorable warmth of him – a human hearth in this cold and perfidious city. His hand slipped behind her head, fingers sinking, burying, into the soft fall of her hair. A hold that steadied her as she dimmed, that refused to let her drift too far into that perilous, beckoning dark.

How strange that sensation should remain so vivid when all else grew soft and translucent at the edges. The gentle insistence of his fingers at her scalp, the weight of his palm cradling her, the soot worked into the lines of his skin, the mark of fire and labour. It was not clean. It was not proper.

Thoughts turned, slow and heavy as the tide, to the girl she had been, to the saint she had been made. Hair always drawn neat, braided with meticulous care, veiled in modesty. No hand had dared disarray what was offered to the divine.

Now, his filthy hand in her uncovered hair.

Eyelashes fluttered, vision struggling. He seemed at once too close and impossibly distant, features blurred as though she beheld him through water.

“Stay…” she murmured.

Even though he had given no sign of leaving, her pale and bloodless hand found the thick of his wrist. She leaned without thought, a flower towards what little sun it may claim, her head settling more fully into his grasp, offering herself to that steadying hold with a helpless, almost child-like trust.

More of her was inside him now, coating the inner chambers of his heart.

"All of the love to @through-fire-and-flame, who is a kind, sweet mun writing a kind, sweet character, that I think everybody should meet. His mastery of the writing art can't be overstated, he is a marvel and an inspiration. Both of you are lights in this corner of the internet, and I'm grateful for your presence."

Sending love and positivity to @through-fire-and-flame a wonderful human being with a wonderful muse, and one of the most inspiring writers out there. Your strength and skill can't be overstated. Wherever you go you bring light. Thank you so much for existing, and may life be kind to you.

Faramir ascended, each step bearing him closer to the belly of darkness itself. Above him, the black throat of the cave gaped like a wound in the earth, oozing with mist and the sour musk of carrion. His comrades had called it folly, madness even, to brave the high pass and retrieve the body of one already claimed by the Shadow – but Faramir could not abandon Thorondir to be dessicated in the webs of Ungoliant’s daughter. Honour, that fragile crown of mortal brows, demanded otherwise.

The wind fell still as he entered and the weight of silence pressed him close, suffocating as grave soil. He carried his bow at his back, his sword bare in his hand. Yet, in that dread cavern, weapons seemed but toys, for the dark itself had weight, palpable, clinging to his very skin like the touch of some jealous hand.

There, crouched among the ragged skeins of silk and ruin, he beheld a figure yet living. One that he recognised.

Laurentius.

Twisted by fear and folly, his hands stained with the chalks and ashes of some stillborn ritual, as though by dissection of filth he might arrive at purity. Heresy, yes, but not of malice. Faramir read it in those hazel eyes, wide and frantic in the gloom. It was the heresy of a moth that burns for light and flutters instead into flame.

A shadow moved before he could speak, vast and ponderous and obscene. The walls themselves seemed to tremble as the monstrous bulk of Shelob unfurled from her secret coil. She was hunger given form, her limbs glistening with night, her eyes a constellation of venomous stars. The stench of her filled the passage – damp stone, fetid womb, the breath of ages that had never known the sun.

Faramir set himself between them, though his spirit quailed as one who felt the imminence of death. In that moment, he thought of Númenor’s doom, of the unyielding cruelty of decay. To stand before such a creature was to stand before the truth of the world – that all flesh is food and all light destined to be swallowed. Yet within his breast some fragile flame persisted, the very antithesis of her.

♡    𝗣𝗢𝗦𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗜𝗧𝗬   𝗙𝗢𝗥   𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗢𝗨𝗚𝗛-𝗙𝗜𝗥𝗘-𝗔𝗡𝗗-𝗙𝗟𝗔𝗠𝗘    ♡