Whispers Waltz Around Our Dreams . . .

What Losa needed was a blowout. She craved a screaming match, a clash of passion - teeth veiled in hungry kisses, muscles straining to embrace - she wanted to feel anything, anything except the horrible burning emptiness that threatened to consume her. The pastel princess snuggled, distraught, into the lush darkness of Hurricane’s fur - and gave a childlike yelp when that warmth abruptly shifted from reach. A split second before Hurricane shrugged her off, there’d been a second of tension . . . a rigid flex of his musculature beneath his flesh, a catch in his breath. Losa whimpered and glanced up at her warrior, mouth parted to ask what was wrong . . .

Horror enveloped her. He uttered her name like a hard slap across the face. And although Hurricane kept himself carefully controlled, Losa knew instantly that something was wrong.

“I have never pretended to understand your magic, it does not flow through me, the way it does you, and so I can not comprehend how it affects you, but you must stop this. You must stop hiding and pretending and taking everything so damn personally.” Not a speech to calm her . . . soothe her . . . but rather to dig deep into her raw nerves. Losa stopped breathing. If Hurricane muttered another word, she would not have heard him past the panicked ringing in her ears. The rapid jumping of her pulse.

In this moment, this span of time fragile enough to be shattered with a breath, the furious flames that fed Losa’s soul flickered out. She tasted the ash of defeat in her mouth: bitter and dry. Choking. She’d fallen hard and fast for Hurricane because he had always been her equal, the only one of her guards to keep up with her breakaway temper and her explosive rages. The colossus had never attempted to crush her spirit, or invalidate the enormous emotions tearing her apart, or reprimand her for the very things that made Losa herself. When the rest of the court tried to smother and cage the comet that blazed through their halls, Hurricane fought - he allowed the wings of her anger to spread, her ire to exercise itself, forever challenging the valkyrie that haunted the palace. He took her seriously. He listened to her. And in the eye of his equally terrifying storm Losa had finally found the home of her heart - the safe place she could rest in without sacrificing the essence of her being. Together the pair created a churning tempest the likes of which their world had never seen . . . but now, when Losa needed Hurricane to clash with her, wanted desperately for him to pull her in and rail against the fallacies of her mind, he simply . . . cut her off. It was if she’d been reaching for the edge of a cliff - grasping for purchase - and Hurricane pushed her back. She felt his rejection as the final slice amputating her soul from the rest of her awareness. Cut off from her own fire, Losa abruptly grew cold.

Her last lifeline in this world, torn away from her.

Slowly the dawn-colored dancer lifted her gaze. Pools that glittered the same lovely, lifeless color as amethysts and sapphires peered into lightning-lit lanterns, no more expressive than marbles made of glass. Her countenance fell into the unreadable Monarch’s Mask she’d been trained to wear since she’d been old enough to walk - perfectly devoid of anything at all, the face of a doll. When lyrics left her maw, they fell without any inflection. Robotic. Chilled. Lifeless, even. “Yes . . . you’re right. I’m being silly. Not acting very queenly, am I?” A smile like a crescent of ice on her velvet lips. Her mother would have been so proud. Losa did not understand what Hurricane meant by “hiding” and “pretending” . . . had she not been within reach, if someone actually wanted to reach her? What about her pain was an act? But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Hurricane had apparently turned off his love for her like someone blowing out a candle, and now the roseate royal would grasp her way blindly in the dark to whatever the hell she was supposed to do.

“Thank you for the wake-up call, Hurricane. What would I do without you?” I’d rot. I’d suffer. I’d die. Words that formed a fist-sized lump in her throat, but which she continued to smile around, serene and pure, allowing the snow of indifference to fall upon the pulsing cardiac muscle in her chest until it’s frigid bite spread numbness down her limbs. He wanted to play this game with her? He wanted to leave her strangled in the knots of her own torment and treat her like a spoiled, needy child? He wanted to pretend, wanted to play-act that everything they’d ever been to each other was something he could so thoughtlessly walk away from? Abandon? Deny? Distantly, her bond to Duma coiled in her gut - revelling in Losa’s anguish, seeking a way to worm between her adoration for Hurricane and the dangerous seed of hatred taking root in the Arcus Irae’s core. It encouraged the frost in her ribcage and her severance from everyone around her. You are mine, it whispered at the base of her spine, a sickening purr that prowled through her veins. You are mine, and no one else’s. No one else wants you. Not like I do.

Losa took a half-step away from the obsidian gladiator she still wanted to call her mate. She looked up, and up, into the flashing yellow portals she wanted to stare into forever, and which glared down at her without the smallest spark of mercy. How dare he do this to her, when his cologne caressed her senses? When not minutes ago she had enjoyed the masculine strength of him, pressed into the onyx forest of his fur? If only Losa could scream at him . . . but she didn’t have enough left in her to shriek in his face, to rake her claws into his flesh and force him to feel. Instead, she dropped her quiet grin to the ground where it broke to pieces, the facade of nothingness closing over to mirror that which Hurricane tried to wear. She might have continued to just look at him, something close to hope fluttering its death throes in her breast, when a single unbidden tear swelled in her left eye and fell glistening down her cheek. Knowing that more followed that treacherous crystalline drop, Losa roughly rushed past her no-longer-knight, frantic to leave him before she started trembling and shattering in front of him all over again. She would find no empathy, no compassion in Hurricane anymore. And she thought she might understand why.

The damned Gods. The stricken Arcus Irae hissed the words in her mind as her finely boned paws whisked her over the terra, further into Dierne Hrof’s center. She had thought herself cut off from their influence upon stepping past the gate - but she’d been wrong. Those cruel, vicious deities were punishing her ruthlessly to this day - attacking her for daring to go against their decree, for daring to fall in love when they’d already sold her soul to a demon. They wanted to destroy her . . . and they were succeeding. As silent tears became muffled cries, as her stalking strides lengthened into a sprint, Losa realized they’d all been doomed from the beginning. If she needed any more proof for her mistakes and the consequences they wrought, she had it now. And the realization was as acid scorching her from the inside out.

☽Arcus Irae Princess | Sister to Zawyne | Chained to Duma | Bound to Hurricane | xathira☾