Antares
[an TAH rez]
✮ sayyida ✮
▻ jyeshtha ♀ (x indira), aminah ♀ ◅
He stands at the edge of the double oasis - staring down into the water. The Dunes were entirely different and also entirely the same, reasons varying. His red marked face reflects back to him a tormented man alone again despite being home. He did not know what to do to mend his heart, much less how to mend the heart of his wife. His own love language being touch was inherently ‘wrong’ in their current state - but still he felt estranged in a way he had never felt with Sayyida.
Had the efforts of the two kingdoms ultimately worked to destroy the happiness between them? Had he reinvigorated a love that had grown poisonous for his beautiful rosy Wife as she looked and him and was reminded of the child they’d had to leave with those they’d fled? Had he an ill effect on her?
He could not blame her if it were true, of course. He had left their daughter behind. He’d been late to find her. He’d had not given her the life he’d promised when they first realized they were Soul-Sewn. It occurs to him in that moment - this was the punishment that had been meted out by their families. This doubt in themselves, the rift in the connectedness they had left the Dunes with, the loss of their family as they knew it. This was the tax placed upon them for not being the puppets their parents wanted.
He feels the itch in his flesh, the want present despite being inappropriate, and he stomps a harsh hoof into the visuals rippling along the ground with a splash. He needed to insulate them, to tuck them into the Dunes, to settle them home so that they could heal.
He shudders in the lonely night, the gravity of the past few years finally pulling the protective mask from around him. He had failed them all - every wound as good as his own. Sayyida’s dulled spark, Atair’s broken body, Rigel’s broken mind and heart, Eness’s lonely look, the boys and girl who’d grown without their fathers, the daughter left behind in a hostile environment…
His fault.
OF THE EASTERN DUNES OF SALEM
▻ eleven years - arabian - mulberry gray with bloodmarks - 15.2 hh ◅