Chapter 47 #2
The following lines were written under duress from Quillon Veritas.
Her gaze was on me, but I didn't look up.
“Staring also seems to be one of your qualities.”
Smirking and without having to look up, I knew what was happening to her cheeks.
“You...” It was her hesitation that made me seek eye contact. “...will give this a chance?”
She seemed genuinely surprised. A miracle that I was able to affect her this way. Normally, she was the one who threw me off balance.
“If that's the only way to show you that you can win debates, then yes.” I finished the last word. “Now let's write.”
She was still staring, causing an inappropriate tingling sensation in my stomach.
“What about?”
“Does the future bestselling author have any requests?”
I had never seen her cheeks so flushed before, but I managed to suppress my triumphant smile... more or less.
“Paradise.”
Prelude: The Atlas March
Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, Reinhold Heil, MDR Rundfunkchor,
MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, Kristjan J?rvi
Sitting in the same room with this woman and doing what I had believed for years I was born to do was overwhelming.
At first, I tried to hold back the tears, but this was Quill, with whom I was writing. She had seen my naked soul. Masks didn't work when we were alone. They crumbled to dust.
The urge to reach for her hand while trying to concentrate on the words in front of me without tensing up was overwhelming.
As if she had read my mind, warm, gentle fingers settled on the back of my hand and I froze, feeling into the pleasant electric tingle that streamed from her fingertips into the rest of my body.
I had missed her. So damn much.
My heart was pounding, starving for her tender body heat, her closeness...
I didn't dare look up, staring at the pen with which I had barely found a title for my poem.
“Just let go.”
She began to caress my hand. So gently that something inside me broke, something that had been destined to be broken by her from the very beginning.
“There's no one here who can judge our words.”
Our words. Not mine. Not hers. Ours.
It only took that request to release a blockage inside me, which in the next moment caused a flood of thoughts to crash down on me.
Quill wanted to withdraw her hand, but I needed her. God, I needed her more than I should. So I reached for her, grasped her hand gently yet firmly, letting her know without even looking up that I depended on her to be able to do this.
And then we wrote. A breath so deep that I already knew it would spoil my greedy lungs.
We didn't pay attention to the time, wrote until Quill had to turn on the dim bedside lamp so we could see, and continued writing until I forced myself to take my hand from hers and leaned back with trembling hands.
Adrenaline pumped through my body.
How had I been able to live so long without this breath?
“Would you like to read yours to me?”
I nodded slowly.
She was the only one I ever wanted to read to again. The only one I wanted to write for.
“You read mine to me after I've read yours to you.”
It was perhaps my only chance to read something of hers. An otherwise missed chance that would kill me with regret.
Quill nodded and handed me her sheet of paper.
She hadn't written much.
Dark Forest
Martia’s Muses
“Wonderland.
A memory that isn't mine. Of an island I will never see.
Misty coniferous forests, so dense and dark that they swallow their inhabitants.
The salty sea crashing against the coastal cliffs, so unpredictably fierce that it drags everything with it into its depths.
A colossal thunderstorm over the town with purple-black cloud towers, so menacing that one might think it had come to devour the island itself.
Victorian mansions with cracked facades haunted by the ghosts of the past, ready to drive the inhabitants into madness.
Poisonous flowers, creeping in the shadows, sprawling through the island’s lush gardens, doomed to drown in the town’s ivy.
A lighthouse on one of the cliffs lures with the only light in sight. But if you look closer, you discover that, amid all the darkness, flickering candles lie hidden. Until you step closer, and it dawns on you that the town is constructed of mirrors.
My paradise is dark.
What it is that draws me to such a grim place?
Perhaps it is the desire to survive in the darkness. The desire of that very part within me that knows nothing but darkness, because it grew up with it and can no longer survive without it.
– Blue”
Slowly, I lowered the sheet.
Was it foolish of me to want to tell her that her mere words made me long for such a destructive place? To think that holding her hand was all I needed to survive anywhere like that?
“Don't say anything,” she begged me as I was about to part my lips, and drew my sheet toward her, past our inkwell.
Now that I knew how she wrote, I wanted more, needed more.
But she gave me no time to reflect on her words as she began to read.
The Architect
Kerry Muzzey, Andrew Skeet,
The Chamber Orchestra Of London
“The Architect
He strives to build a paradise.
One he would pay for every prize.
His gold, his mind, his vanity.
Would offer all his sanity.
There was no thing he would refuse,
And so, the Gods send him a muse.
A mortal soul with a heavy heart,
Eager to tear herself apart
So he could build his golden city
Gigantic, flawless, unique and pretty.
He never planned to get lost in her soul.
So much that it would swallow him whole.
But how could he build his legacy
While bending to her heart his knee?
The city needed his full attention.
Or he would lose his only invention.
He knew the day would come to decide
To do what’s important and toss her aside.
So, without mercy he betrayed her trust
Her crumbling hope turned into dust.
He shattered her for a legacy so dark
Ignored that she’d left on him her mark.
Too late he turns around and sees.
The fruit of his destructive disease.
His city collapses without its roots
A degenerate garden, rotten fruits.
Between the ruins of what he had built.
He cried, getting eaten by his guilt.
Because all this mess made him realize.
With her he lost his true paradise.”
The Voice in My Heart – Piano
(Violet Evergarden Original Soundtrack)
maats, Evan Call
“This is beautiful, Davian.” She smiled softly at what I had written. “You carry poetry within you.”
The goose bumps under my white shirt, which had reacted to her voice, to my words coming out of her mouth, refused to subside.
“Rather sad, our paradise.” Her expression suggested that she was mentally transported to the place she had described. “Unreachable. Lost.” She looked up. “We are not made for this world, Davian.”
“For which world then?”
“For none. That's why we are mortal.”
Our eyes met.
She continued.
“All this suffering is part of this experience. A brief experience. Made to be savored before it is torn from beneath our feet.”
“So I'm wasting my time...”
She smiled almost imperceptibly.
“Only if you live for tomorrow.”
And in that moment, I couldn't help but allow myself a few seconds to imagine what it would be like if she were my tomorrow. I would waste my time without regret.
Too late, I realized I was staring at her cheek.
Mystery of Love
Sufjan Stevens
“What?” She touched the spot. “Do I have ink on my face?”
I wasn't really thinking clearly when I dipped the dip pen into the inkwell, leaned forward, and left a gentle stroke of ink on her nose.
She flinched and I leaned back, amused.
“Now you do.”
She stared at me as if paralyzed, and the corners of my mouth lifted higher and higher.
“Hey!” she suddenly exclaimed, dipping her pen into the inkwell, so I jumped up and backed away.
She also rose abruptly.
“You don't really think I'm going to let you have this triumph, do you?”
She wanted to step around the table, but I rushed through the door into the hallway, down the stairs, followed by Quill.
“Davian!” she called after me. “Stop!”
Streusel followed me playfully through the hallway, jumping around me, and I had to dodge him, which allowed Quill to catch up and grab me by the arm.
She pushed me with far too much force, but in order not to step on Streusel, I lost my balance, fell to the floor, and pulled Quill down with me.
She landed more or less roughly on top of me, her slender body pressed against mine, to my surprise with a triumphant grin on her lips, before she took my chin in her hand and in the next moment placed the pen against my cheek.
“Gotcha,” she whispered playfully, focusing intently on my cheek.
My chest rose and fell heavily as emotions I had never felt before overwhelmed me.
I was no longer able to think clearly, could only feel how soft her fingers felt on my cheek, how she was obviously writing something on it.
But her sweet scent was too intoxicating, as was the way her hair fell forward in that very moment of concentration.
Streusel made himself comfortable between my lower legs, but everything else around me slipped further and further into the background.
She let go of my chin and looked at me.
Her smile disappeared.
I felt her breast against my chest. Her thigh pressed against my groin, and the moment I became aware of it, all the blood rushed to my crotch.
I got hard. Against her.
She should get up and leave, but her gaze wandered to my lips, settled there, and her own opened slightly.
Fuck.
She was so beautiful. A tomorrow I would never have. One that I wanted nothing more than to taste at that moment.
Her gaze slid back to my eyes, searching for something I couldn't give her. Something she had control over at that very moment. Something she could take because I was too weak to fight her with my reason.
The last remnants of clarity left my mind as her head moved much too slowly toward mine.
My lips parted slightly as well, to take a shallow breath, so that her eyes once again lost themselves in mine.
I had no control over my hand, which rose on its own, about to touch her hip, her lips, just inches from mine, when a shrill ringing shattered the silence.
Sneaky
original_soundtrack
We both flinched.
My hand froze.