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“Is it him?”She is standing on a ridge overlooking the sleeping valley. The dome of night arcs above and behind her. Vaguely, he can perceive her outline by the haunting light of the moon and the stars.She is taut with anxious uncertainty and, he notes with a pang of amusing bitterness, a kind of yearning. A longing both for it to be so and to be not. She holds preternaturally still for her usual restless disposition. Only her eyes flash like silver mirrors inside the near-perfect dark.He sighs as he approaches, stepping softly, elegantly over the hardpan. His footsteps make no sound.“I believe so.” She holds herself and covers her mouth the back of her hand. Her breath catches on a sob, the genesis of which he cannot say with certainty. He believes it is relief and horror and sorrow and joy. He will not ask her because he cannot bear to know. His vanity cannot suffer divided loyalties.Just like his father.“What did he say?” her voice sieves through her kaleidoscoping emotions. She is trembling, he realizes, as he comes to stand beside her. He looks up in the stars.With no competing light from the silent Earth, they are brilliant, close and multicolored, a trembling cathedral of stained glass lights set within an indigo sky. Once, his greatest aspiration was to live above them.Now he knows he never shall.“Only what he has said before,” his tone is quiet. Acrid. Embittered. Seething. Yet soft. “He does so love to repeat himself. As you well know.”“Did he ask about us?”“Never once.” He turns to regard her fully. She is a thing of beauty beyond which he has words to describe. Though he was named for his physical perfection, he is eclipsed by hers.To his damned sight, there is none in the universe so beautiful or good.The stars reflect themselves in the liquid surfaces of her eyes, which look down into the desert. Straining hopefully against the shadows for a glimpse of him whom she so loves and fears. It makes his heart shake with jealousy.Would she look for him so, if they were long-parted? Would she long to see his face after he cast her out into darkness? Would she love him, if he showered his favor upon other, less-worthy ones?No, he thinks with corrosive ache, she would not.“Go to him, then.” He hides his ire with a sniff and arranges his cuffs around his slender white wrists.Even the voracious night cannot hide his strangely alluring coloring, his complexion catches every glance of light from the twinkling stars and the moon that sluices through their midst. Delicately, he touches his hair, the source of his other namesake. The one his father called him, when he was the beloved son.“Go and give him an offering. Tell him that you confess, that you long for reconciliation. Surely, if he listens so faithfully to the chatter and prattle of clay creatures, he will take your confession. For does he not love deference and flattery? Does he not love to be loved?”“Armitage-”He winces away from her gentle reproach.She is the only one in the whole universe to call him by that name. In their language, it means the one I behold. It is a most tender term of endearment. For that which is beheld, is so greatly loved.
Armitage, my great love.
“I don’t wanna leave you,” he sneers at her attempt to soothe his ruffled scales, until her fingers light upon him, cool and reassuring against his cheek. “I just wanted to know if he… still knew… it doesn’t matter.”She steps into him. Her arms wind around his waist. She is still so, so small.She was very young when he took her love, weaving her in a web of soft kisses and tender deceptions. Promises of glory and worship. Of ever-lasting greatness and love. A throne fit for a queen, held high above the stars. She’d hesitated, for loyalty was her nature. Her name, truth.
Rey.
But he could not leave without her. Of all that he coveted, and that was such a great number of good and wondrous things – power and praise and immutability, absolutism – it was her he desired most of all. He could not bear to be second inside her heart.Not even to their creator.“Please don’t be cross with me, Armitage. I didden mean any harm.”Looking into her upturned face, his animus fades away. “Of course you did not.”He wraps her up in his protection, enfolding her against what is inevitable. What is to come.For not the first time he wonders, why make a thing so delicate to pour into your love, only to be plagued for the rest of your days with the fear it shall be smashed and ruined and lost to you forever? Why fashion the very instrument of your own heartbreak and sorrow?She lays her head down on his chest and sweetly sighs, and he knows his answer.It is not choice. He must love her.He simply must.“Armitage, when can we go home?” she whispers. For a creature so old, she sounds like one of their young.He holds her head to him and sways with her. “Soon, my darling. Very soon.”Deception. It is all that he has left.“To the stars above the stars?” she whispers, winding her little fingers in his shirt.“Yes, my love. Yes, exactly.”His breath does not shake. It does not. He pulls back to catch her gaze with a beguiling smile. His cold, clear blue eyes are silver-bright and full of stars.“But will you not stay down here with me a little while longer, so that I may dance with you in the dust?”She smiles, “I love to dance.”“I know you do,” he leans down to kiss her, so that her eyes close before she can see the tears that slip like liquid mercury down his pale skin. They take with them his delusions, his shattered ambitions and ruined pride.When the time comes, he will not let her parish beside him. He will send her back before the final call. She will not pay for his follies, this he prays as the clay creatures do, on his knees with head bowed. For her sake, let me keep this vow.Who listens to him, he does not know.Their lips part with the softest of sounds.She too is weeping. Their tears fall to her breasts and mingle together, silvers trails glistening under the living, glimmering moon.“Hush, my sweet,” he thumbs her cheeks, and takes up her hands. One to place upon his shoulder, the other to weave within his own.They forget about the man down in the desert as they start to dance.