Page 52 of Antiletum (The Nocturne #1)
My own chosen madness
Delaney
T he doors to my half-moon balcony are thrown wide, inviting the late night breeze to wash over the balustrade and across my fevered skin.
Though it’s still stiflingly hot during the unforgiving hours of day, cool undertones of change lace the air: hints of autumn approaching like a reaper, a reminder that every single thing withers and dies. Seasons are no exception.
I stand in front of a full length mirror, inspecting the new, permanent changes to my body.
The salve Val gave me to heal my new piercings has long since lost its sheen, drying in the breeze that I welcome and crave like a hug.
Miraculous, how quickly it worked. Same as it did on our lips before.
When we tenderly cared for each other with quiet, shy smiles.
Sharing a soft kiss before falling asleep wrapped around each other.
There’s no more discomfort. No redness or inflammation. Absolutely no pain when I brush my fingers over my nipples, my clit, revelling over the cool metal lodged in my flesh for the rest of my days. In truth, it sends a thrilling zip of pleasure through my whole body with the lightest touch .
My ever thoughtful husband.
Tell me to stop . Val’s words echo through my head like an omnipresent maelstrom, twisting together with another voice. Sending me back to a neglected spirlinary that I haven’t stepped foot inside of in a decade. Eviscerating the few scraps of myself that are left.
How could he have known that one simple sentence would affect me so thoroughly?
Shatter the wall I’ve constructed between us.
I would have given in to Val piercing my clit, just the same as the bars now speared through my nipples, even if he hadn’t uttered that agonizing plea in that particular tone.
Images of the past that I so badly want to plaster onto my present and future possessed me in that moment like a demon. My response to Val’s demand has broken me completely, fully giving in to the delusion of what I wish we were.
Rapidly, I swing away from my reflection to change. Needing to get away from these endless reminders of Val, intent on warping reality into a dream.
One I was never allowed to have.
No mind is paid to the plain black dress I drop over my head, the shoes I slip on my feet. Surroundings are a blur when my mechanical legs carry me through The Citadel, across the picturesque grounds, to the streets of Omnitas beyond.
Perhaps it’s foolish to wander the city alone and unprotected, especially at night.
But I can’t bring myself to care about my own self preservation, or do anything but long for the small spirlinary I made a point to visit when I first arrived back in this wretched place, but was too cowardly to step inside.
The one where my entire life came together, and where it ultimately fell apart.
Tell me to stop .
Val’s plea, the expression he wore, I can’t beat it out of my head.
I can’t force wisps of the past back into their carefully constructed box.
Their voices, so different but somehow exactly the same, replay faster and faster with every step, every winding street, every tall statue and carving of the Nocturne littered throughout Omnitas, watching over me like sentinels.
The glowing eyes of owls perched on top of buildings, amongst the trees, line my trek—almost as if they’re directing me where to go.
I’m unable to register the progression of time or the burning ache in my legs from my rush to reach my destination—like my heart might stop beating and my soul drift away if I don’t set foot in the sanctuary immediately.
The song of a barred owl accompanies me along the way, its melody reminiscent of a daytime mourning dove, their moniker much more fitting for my world at present.
Again, my thoughts roam to Val, this time of him in his beautiful, dark barn owl form.
My skin practically buzzes, wanting to feel his feathers brushing against me again, the same draw to my husband and his owl making too many things I swatted away before demand to click into place.
Rounding a corner, there the squat, dark stone spirlinary sits.
Small and unassuming against many others, certainly in comparison to the veritable cathedral within The Citadel.
Its appearance is just the same as it was recently; the same as it was ten years ago, tall weeds breaking through the stone path.
I cough a loud sob at the sight, drowning in bittersweet notes of nostalgia while I stagger my way towards it, not sure what epiphany I plan to find within its walls but knowing that I have to go inside this time.
Reconcile myself with the past and put it to rest. The door creaks open on rusty hinges, the must of neglect caressing my nose, the darkness within acting as a host .
I stop in my tracks. Frozen at the sight before me, the large form of a man sitting on a window bench, turned away from me to gaze outside.
Falling forward, I brace myself on a column at the end of a row of pews.
More thorns knot in my throat. I can scarcely breathe past them, tearing me apart from within.
“Delaney,” Val says—flat, emotionless, numb —still staring out the window.
As much as I wish I were, I’m not truly surprised to find him exactly where I was drawn to. I think deep down, I knew he’d be here all along. Waiting for me just the same as I’ve been searching for him.
“How did you know I would come here?” I ask, clinging to my crumbling denial like it’s the only thing I have left. Same as I clutch against the pillar keeping the ceiling from crashing on my head. “Who told you?”
Maybe Rainah made Val aware of my history with this place sometime in their years of knowing each other, despite our parents’ threats.
Or one of the guards who shadowed me here told him.
Other options are simply impossible. The chance that all the familiarity and similarities that my longing wanted to find within my husband weren’t a figment of my imagination at all is entirely unfeasible. I cannot accept it.
My wrecked heart won’t survive the hope that such a notion would inspire.
“I didn’t know you would come here,” Val whispers, and he could very well be talking to the infinite night for the way he refuses to glance my way.
Finally, he peels himself from the star strewn sky and turns to me, heartache owning his onyx stare.
“This particular spirlinary is the sanctuary that I often seek. Where I come when I’m feeling completely lost. ”
A crawling sensation falls from my chest, down my stomach, all the way to my toes on my shaky feet.
Moonlight splashes through a paneless window across Val’s handsome, haunting face, lined with exhaustion and too many other things that I can’t quite put a name to.
Or maybe Val’s been right all along. I could pinpoint each and every one, I just don’t want to.
Because I imagine I am just as creased with the exact same emotions, mirroring his.
The stone altar sitting at the front of the spirlinary , facing the pews, is littered with empty bottles and bowls, no casting ingredients to be found—the only major difference in setting from the first time I came here.
Maybe if it had been fully abandoned then, I wouldn’t have made the decisions I did.
I wouldn’t have set into motion the facilitation of an even more agonizing and closed off existence than the one I led before.
Tell me to stop.
Those words were first whispered to me, right in this very room during a pivotal moment—a choosing. With only the Nocturne to witness.
Or so we had thought.
A tear falls down my face, admission building in my throat.
One I should have voiced from the very beginning.
“You remind me of someone that I loved very much,” I say, choked with how the truth doesn’t want to be released from my body.
Stuck in there, shielded, outwardly silent, and alone for far too long.
“Every time I look at you, all I can see is him.”
I force myself to look at Valledyn now, closely, in a dissecting manner I have mostly tried to avoid.
To inspect and recognize every inch of his beautiful face that calls to the past and the only person my heart has ever longed for—other than Val.
And his owl form. Those similarities have made the draw to him undeniable.
Fierce. Intoxicating. And so incredibly guilt ridden sometimes I believe I might fold completely beneath the magnitude of it.
It’s all been my own chosen madness, trying to make my husband someone that he’s not while also trying to protect myself in the process, keeping him at arms length. I’m guilty of exactly what he accused in the graveyard, taking just enough to sustain myself before pushing him away.
Val says nothing, his jaw visibly tensing, even in the darkness.
“But you can’t be him,” I continue. “No matter how badly I want you to be. You can’t. Because he’s dead. He’s been dead for ten years, and even I couldn’t bring any piece of him back. He always ignored my calls—through a mirror. Because my necromancy is what got him killed in the first place.”
It’s freeing, almost. To say these things aloud and shed some of the blood on my hands.
I’ve never spoken about it to anyone. Not to Rainah, or Tabitha, and certainly not my parents.
They expressly forbade me from ever mentioning the situation again, right when they thinned the minor gaps between the bars on my cage, hiding me from the world effectively before I gave my secret away again.
After years of trying to convince them to give me lenience and freedom, I took my punishment willingly because even a prison was better than what I deserved.
Val throws his head back against the wall gently, releasing a harsh breath while he stares at the vaulted ribbed ceiling, as if my admittance is pulling him apart at the seams.