I laughed. There was something highly amusing about watching him run up the hill to us. His glasses were splatted with rain as he tried to scramble up, attempting to use the little brawn he had. I slipped a pale hand down her forehead, down her nose jutting from her face to a single point. I imagined cutting her face in half, how beautifully symmetrical it would be. All because of her pointed nose.
I was mist to her, a black shadow untouched by the storm building to its apex around her. Her eyes watched me the way a mouse watches a cat creep ever closer, irises turning black and sightless. Terrified gazes ever so beautiful, gazes ready to glaze over with a single brush of my feather light touch. I shifted back a pace as he neared us, my comrade and I watching him loom larger than the average life.
Light burned behind his glasses, piercing my victim with life’s brilliance. When life and death stand side by side, is one not blacker, and the other brighter? Shadows and darkness are bed fellows, shadows dance within the light. But can darkness touch light without being scorched to a lesser being? Certainly not. Can light cross to darkness without fear of being quenched? Only one could, He and He alone.
And so I watched as death and life danced their subtle dance of pitch and gold. Both were brilliant in their element, both ready to take the life and make it brighter – or darker. It was her choice, the one laying there as he panted up to her. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, pressing them back onto his face with practised ease.
‘Lydia!’ he cried, and I pressed a hand to my mouth to stop a chuckle. How funny these mortals were with their dramatic shows of emotion. Did she know he kindled something darker with another woman? How deliciously ironic that mortal love can be “kindled” and yet turn hearts to ash. The light within him flickered and died, allowing me to curl in on her other side. I was an obsidian guardian waiting for her last moments with light to fade.
‘Henry.’ She sighed, allowing my warm rush of darkness to soothe her heart ache, ‘I’m afraid I’m dying.’ My imagination showed me her corpse devoid of life, her glassy eyes that of a porcelain doll on the mountain side. How time will ravage her the way the ocean beats against rocks. How beautiful she will be as dust becomes dust.
And her soul? I grinned mirthlessly, why she will dwell in the house of lost souls. I am a demon who must collect that which is given him. She would not give her life to Him, so I am her reward for such disobedience. I wiggled in expectation and there I held her a single brushstroke from death.
And yet; yet a single word rang from death's lips, a word that would haunt her soul in a way no creature could ever shake. She breathed it in and out before taking my outstretched hand. Just as I curled my fingers through hers I hissed in pain as she whispered reconciliation.
‘Sorry.’
I had won. I had ripped her from any chance of redemption to Him. And yet my mortal heart cried a moment’s relief before burying back deep inside. Away from a time when from love I did not wish to hide.
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