[an TAH rez]
✬ sayyida ✬
▻ jyeshtha ♀ (x indira), aminah ♀ | nashira ♀ ◅
He will be sorry later for scaring her - partly - but for that moment he hopes that the startling level of foot-down he exerted would snap her out of what he had previously thought was his fault and his duty to respect. He had been a fool, letting her languish and wallow and pity herself until she had pulled almost entirely out of his arms so he barely felt any warmth in their marriage. He had thought he was being kind, that it was shameful to want her old self back when he was the reason it had been lost.
"You haven’t failed me." LIES, he snorts and looks away sharply, denying that attempt at healing with all the power he still had in him after her shocking attempt to sever them for good. If he had not failed, why was she trying to leave. If he had not failed, why had she never come back to him. If he had not failed, what is it that made her so easy to believe that he would find someone else to replace her?
"I do not wish to go, but I am not... worthy of being your Mira. I am only letting you down. I have shackled you to monogamy despite it being against your nature, and against our ways. For what? For me to waste our new beginning mourning our past?" He looks at her sharply, his breathing heaving his shoulders, his eyes sharp and keen, his nostrils fluttering with the attempted restraint. "Surely you cannot look me in the eye and say that a mare such as Nyimara would not be more of a match for you? More of a Mira to our people?"
He bares his teeth at that, his sharp exhale coming from his mouth and nostrils as if he needed to rid himself of all the air that those words might have touched. "Has the desert sun utterly stolen your eyes, Sayyida--WIFE and OTHER HALF OF MY HEART!?" He sounds more alive and vigorous now, gone now the shackles of eggshell walking. "That woman is a cobra. And she brings war wherever she walks. I knew it even when we came here. Did you not see her? Hear her? How have you missed how she takes joy in the frantic eyes of Aldebaran on her new child - how she is the reason our family has had our first attack from those she angers on the island of ice?" He grunts open-mouthed in disgust, pivoting himself away from his wife for fear that his ire might wash over onto her and chase her only further away.
"You shackled me? I shackled myself. I broke your trust before ever I sought it by being with Indira. I avoid the women of the Sadim to assure you, to make you see that I am not willing to risk you for any earthly power or momentary pleasure… but now you’d feed me to them? It is not what I have been raised to know, but it is a life that I led because you were more important to me..." He looks then back to her, lining his face suddenly alongside her own so his eye was directly before her own, the front of their cheeks locked so there was no closer that they could look into one another's eyes. "I have looked at and seen no woman but you since I became the Sheik of this Sadim. I have laid with no woman but you since we married. I have sought no wife but you and will never seek another if you leave me. My life was yours the moment you gave yourself to me." Cannot look her in the eye? It was perhaps the first time he had ever truly become confrontational with her, but she had challenged him and so he answered.
"Leave if you must, if that is what is left of us, but I will not have any other carry the name of Mira so long as I am Sheik." He backs away again, hurt plain in his face now that the frantic anger born of the fear of loss had dissipated. "Tell me what I am to do? What does the future hold, then? I have tried to walk tenderly, talk tenderly, take care not to show too much kindness to those who join us lest they set their sights on our wounded hearts and fraying bond -- I have swallowed my hate for my failures and the distance that they have born from your… I cannot..." Do anything… it remains unsaid, and he closes his eyes to hide the weakness that might have been exposed in them if he had looked properly at her now
OF SALEM’S EASTERN DUNES
▻ eleven years - arabian - mulberry gray with bloodmarks - 15.2 hh ◅