Page 41 of These Eternal Bones

Something horrid buds in my chest, goosebumps dotting my skin underneath my night slip.

Like I’m bracing for a blow that hasn’t come yet.

We stand in silence, his eyes glued to my chest, mapping each stunted breath.

His voice is quiet when he speaks again.

“They said they could help; I wanted you to be happy, syringa. I wanted to see you swollen with my child, too. The idea had become as much your fantasy as mine. You’d lie across me and talk of the child as if they were here, ready to be loved and held.

Perhaps by the end of it…I had been desperate, too. ”

“Did they give us a baby?” Oh my god, did I have a baby? One that I cannot remember? The thought seems too terrible, too wrenching.

“No, my love. They murdered you.”

A choke on a sob, nearly swaying on my feet. “Why?”

“They worshipped balance, the natural order, and light. Life . Everything I am not. Everything I pollute in the world. My work was known to the coven. Word had traveled of a God, a new creature killing humans and making them…something else. Alive but not . Unnatural .” He keeps speaking, but it’s as if he’s reading text from a book, there’s little affect to his words, for now, he’s something else.

Somewhere far away. “They spoke of me from before I found you, from before I was wiped anew. I had killed many, so many that it wiped towns and cities dry. My children had done the same, killing without care or pause. They only knew hunger. The witches thought fate had given them a perfect chance to stop it, carnage and atrocities I couldn’t remember, but I don’t doubt the validity of. ”

My legs shake as I lower myself to the rug in front of the fireplace, trying to ward off a deep bone chill settling in my bones. His eyes never leave the now empty place I had just occupied.

“They had doted and cared for you, prepared you for the ritual for a month . For a month, they plotted and tricked, a month I had to only rip the blinders from my eyes and look . What they did was so much worse than even I could have imagined. Your death was the catalyst, the sacrifice and balance they needed for this fucking curse. They could not kill me, so they bound me instead. I had no idea…no clue at the time what else they had done until after. One of the final ones remaining told me of my new hellish existence. She laughed while she sobbed. Assuring me my mate would come back, over and over again, only to die after each bond. She told me my penance was a thousand years, for the thousand I had defiled and pillaged. I could not turn you, couldn’t bring you back, or we would never leave this place.

A thousand years would turn into an eternity.

I had no idea then that they would feel the same. ”

“W-what did you do then?”

His eyes snap to mine then. “I soaked the earth in their blood. I did not feed but slaughtered. Men, women–”

“Children?” I sob.

“I killed everything within the boundary of my prison.”

“Your…friends? The vampires you made? Why?”

“They took you from me!” He roars, making me flinch.

“I wouldn’t have stopped had they not bound my damned eternal bones to the fucked land.

I would’ve run the seas red. I would’ve bled the fucking world for you if only to make it feel a fraction of the loss I felt!

You were good and pure! You were the good in me, and you just wanted a baby!

You paid the penance for my crimes, and you will keep paying until my mind is long shattered, and I fear I will no longer recognize your soul.

I can feel it, the madness and grief worming and choking every hour of every day, waiting to bury you again. It is a divine sort of pain!”

He rages, his energy endless as I struggle to get to my feet, the weight dragging me so deep it seems an elephantine task. “Then it is a fate well deserved. You proved to be exactly the monster they thought you were.” The words feel like venom on my tongue.

He’s there in front of me, his lip inches from mine. His voice takes on that eerie quality I thought had once been so befitting a god of malice and not the sweet man he’d shown himself to be. “Of course it is. I am a monster, but it matters not, syringa, because you are bound to me.”

My fists ball, my nails pricking my palms as an ugly guttural sound leaks from my throat. “I-I do not want you.” It’s a lie, we both know it. I can feel him as surely as he can feel me. Our bond throbbing with shared agony and grief.

His voice breaks when he speaks next, his tendrils falling limp around him. “You haven’t the choice.”

“Cartiel!” I scream, not surprised when he casually slinks into the room shortly after. He never goes far. “Please tell the selkie to pack my things, I wish to go to the cottage.”

“Syringa, please do not go,” Elric whispers. “Every second is–”

I turn away, ignoring him, my emotions a whirlpool in my mind.

Molly

My chest aches with the weight of my own sobs, turning the next page filled with her words with trembling fingers.

“Cartiel left an hour ago to gather my things. I hope he returns soon. Now that I’ve had time to calm down, I realize how badly I hadn’t wanted to leave.

How terrible the things I said are. I knew that our time was limited to a degree.

I mean…I’m human, he’s not. But this, god, my chest aches.

The broken sound of his voice before I left, needling it alongside the pang of the bond. He is suffering.

He always suffers.

Here I am, tormenting him further.

When Cartiel returns, I’ll–“

I frown, sniffling at the sudden cutoff of her writing. Turning the page, there’s nothing…

The rest of the diary is blank. Blinking to clear my eyes, I scour the leather bound, paint smeared book again as if I missed something.

It just...stops.

My body seems to work with a mind of its own after that, my thoughts heavy as I put the diary down, draining and refilling the water in the tub that’s run cold.

Trapped.

A child.

A broken god.

So, so much loss.

And hate.

Rage like nothing I’ve known.

The next time I blink, I’m nude, and the bath is nearly overflowing, but I don’t rush to turn it off, my chest and mind swapping wildly between numb and aching.

The water is hot, too hot when I lower myself into it, barely biting back a hiss.

My core is sore from the last time we were together and the water slips underneath my sensitive breasts next.

We had a snowball fight; we played and laughed and–

“It’s been seven hundred years, and I still have not grown into the man she deserved.”

Tears burst into my eyes as I wrap my arms around my legs, hugging them tightly to my chest like that will hold everything in. It makes sense now, why he didn’t want to tell me, why he fought so hard against it all. The bond is a beautiful gift, perverted. He…he did this to us.

But did he?

Has he not suffered enough?

The month leading up to Imogen’s bond last time, he was the same, wildly possessive and on edge.

Starving himself.

There was no mention of how it was done, but one could fathom it had something to do with feeding.

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to imagine that empty place inside my chest filled with…

something. With him. How wonderful or terrifying it would be to feel the things he does.

If it would weigh me down and frazzle my mind like it did hers.

I frown. According to the beginning of the diary, she’d lived a good life…

her mother and father loved her. She had a brother she missed, but she was happy.

Whole with friends and an education. She had ties.

No real strife or loss to mar her thoughts.

No internalized self-hatred to whisper in her ear as she tried to fall asleep, at least none that I could see.

She was untouched by the kind of thing that makes one…feel like this. Caught off guard by the weight of it.

I know then that I- this version of me could handle it.

I could hold him when he couldn’t bear the weight of himself.

I thought to forgive him, before realizing there’s nothing to truly forgive.

Funny, I’d spent my whole life being taught to worship one made of warm flesh and cunning smiles…

all the while, soul bound and fated to one who was ice cold and everything I was told to fear.

Funny, except little actually feels humorous right now.

How could it?

The water grows cool by the time the door opens, there’s no knock, but there never is, and I can’t find it in myself to mind.

Elric steps in shirtless, water sleuthing off his inky strands of hair as if he bathed elsewhere.

His body is toned and chiseled. It’s strange I ever thought him a mere man at all.

Even from a distance. My eyes fall to the pajama slacks falling low on his hips, outlining every obscene bulge and curve of him.

For once, his tendrils are nowhere in sight.

I try to look at him differently, knowing that I should.

I try to feel horror and disgust, fear like Imogen, but none comes.

Or if it does, I can’t sort it apart from the overwhelming sense of sadness in my heart.

The god of Blood and Eternal Death looks at me with the same degree of pain, and this time, I finally understand it.

There’s substance to the agony in his eyes, the worry and pacing.

The madness. God of Blood and Eternal Death, I suppose, is a very fitting, weighty title to complement the being in front of me.

I’d prefer to call him Elric Onogahara, Vampire Lord of Port Clyde.

We stay like that, taking each other in, him with the lens of nearly a thousand years of grief and me perhaps clearly for the very first time.

When his attention leaves me, flitting to the dairy, it is jarring, like stepping from the fireplace into the snow.

He doesn’t mask his movements like usual, keeping them smooth and languid.

I don’t think that he can, the bond and hunger riding him hard.

One moment he’s looking at the paint smeared leather, the next it’s in his hands.

His eyes widen as he flips it open, his fingers smoothing over the pages, and suddenly, he looks his age.

I can see the weight of eternity in the obsidian depths of his eyes.

He skips forward toward the back, to where it ends, before he brings it to his nose, inhaling the pages.

It feels intimate, a private moment of grief that I shouldn’t witness, but I don’t look away. It’s me he’s grieving after all.

But I’m right here .

“I had nearly gutted the estate, looking for this,” he offers, but it’s a quiet, near whisper. I’m not sure it’s meant for me until his eyes find mine. “Where did you get it?”

“The library.”

He just nods. “I had suspected the Nephilim of taking it.”

“We were friends.” A pang fills my chest; it makes sense now why he can’t stand the sight of me. I can’t say I blame him.

“You were inseparable. I hated it.”

I want to smile at that, but one won’t quite form. Like the muscles are atrophied. “It cuts off…”

I know why, I don’t need to ask. They fought, she- I said terrible things, and then died, leaving him alone again. God, for so long. Who takes care of him when I’m not here?

“You died that night, in the cottage. The Nephilim had returned for your things. I’d held him up, attacked him, so it took a great deal longer than it should’ve.

” He swallows hard, like he’s forcing the words through his throat.

“You went to open the door to let him in and tripped on your skirts. Such a stupid, silly thing to do. You just tripped…but when you fell, your head struck the woodstove. In a moment, you were gone. Your last thoughts of me…it was one of the hardest ones. You died thinking I was–”

“I died loving you. I was going to come back.”

His eyes pitch in pain, a single inky tear escaping.

“I can still hear the Nephilim’s screams as he tried to tether your soul to your body. I knew…I knew before I reached the cottage. It is a visceral kind of severing in my chest.”

My tears join the bathwater, disrupting the surface. Who knows how long I’ve been sitting here, my skin long gone wrinkly.

“You were thorough in your recounting in that life, a talented writer… ”

The question hangs in the air; I just nod, my knees pressing into my cheek.

“How can you stand the sight of me knowing what you know?” It’s a broken, soft kind of question, but I know what it took for him to ask.

“Knowing how deeply I am loved? I suppose fine enough, it helps that you are pretty to look at.”

He chuffs out a shocked laugh, the sound gravelly and deep before he quickly sobers. “I’ve made a mess of things, my love.”

“I’d like to get out now.”

He’s there in an instant, a warm towel in hand, lifting me from the water and wrapping me tight.

It’s not that I’m not…horrified by what I learned.

It’s certainly not that the weight of it, what we lost..

.what was taken from us isn’t shredding my heart, perhaps it’s the detachment.

A skill I learned at an early age, to separate yourself from the scary, upsetting things. Things you can do nothing about.

Perhaps it’s a na?ve sort of surety in my chest that he won’t endure another.

Maybe it’s because I’ve lived my entire life without him, and I feel robbed of every life before.

The memories and smiles, kisses, laughs, and tears, they were taken from me just the same as they were taken from him.

Maybe I’m tired of the emptiness in my chest, that I want what scared Imogen so much.

He tucks me into him, pressing a soft kiss to the top of my head before he tugs off the towel to dry me.

I still my chin, a wave of rightness smashing past the self-pity and agony.

I want him to know I can do it; I can bear the weight of him.

Perhaps it’s because I’m tired of waiting and listening, obeying and skirting around the issue.

Perhaps I know exactly how to force his hand.

He stops abruptly where he’s kneeling in front of me, toweling off my legs as I dig my fingers into the wet strands of his hair, tugging his head to mine, inhaling him back.

As much as I am his, he is mine.

We’ve lost enough time.

I won’t spare a moment more.