I find you in the graveyard, your face hidden by your sable hair. Moonlight shines on your ebony wings, gilding them in silver.
I clutch the crucifix at my neck.
Your eyes, red as hell, find mine. You don’t rise from the gravestone you are resting on. You just glare at me, with a hatred that I’m not familiar with.
“You dare bring that thing here.” You scoff. “You really are frightened of me.”
A cold October wind scatters the fringes of my white dress. I appear ghostly in this night, among these graves, among the trees skeletal and foreboding.
And you? You are a shadow, a crow, a harbinger of the realm from whence you came.
But I can’t help but love you. I can’t help but despair at your loss.
“I want to save you,” I say, my feet stepping forward on ancient earth, earth fed with dead ones.
“Liar,” he whispers—a whisper filled with venom, the utterance of a serpent.
I stare at you. I lift the crucifix from around my neck—a twinkling trinket in the moon-bright night.
Steel wraps around my words. “It’s not that you can’t be saved. You don’t want to be saved.”
You lift your pale, chiseled face to the sky. What do you see there? I see stars, and beyond them moons of a thousand colors and mysteries, but you…you, born of Heaven, child-servant of the Underworld, what do you see?
“I was cast aside like chaff, like an old wineskin, like a deformed babe.” Your eyes find mine again. “I made my home in shadow, and shadow took me. I am safe in the darkness, Eris.”
Tears burn my eyes. “And you won’t even reach for the light?”
You turn. Your wings cover you as you kneel. “No. Why would I?”
The moon beams. The wind slithers over the stones like water.
“Leave that thing,” you say.
I place the crucifix on the ground, next to a marker, the engraving long faded with time.
“Now come here, Darling.”
I walk to you, and your wings engulf me like shadow. Your breath is warm as it tickles my tongue, and your lips are hot against mine. I reach up to your neck—I am falling, and I have to grasp at something. You steady me with your strong hands.
The kiss is long. The kiss is sweet. But it ends.
“Goodbye, Eris.”
My eyes open to moonlight, trees, and stone. But you are gone. Not even the hint of your warm breath is left behind.
I am so cold.
I collapse on the ground and weep—I weep because I know never again will I lay my eyes on you. And forever now will I be alone, for I was yours, and you were mine.
But there is no one left to love me.
There is a tinkling, like the smallest, softest bell. I turn, and the crucifix is still there. It shines like a star in the dirt.
I pick it up with tear stained hands. My breath comes to me in a shudder.
Perhaps I am not alone.
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