Chapter 43 #2
My throat tightens, and overcome, I lean my head against her chest and squeeze my eyes shut against the wave of emotion.
For two centuries, I have been encased in the ice of death, but Willa has cracked me open to the elements.
After so long buried, I am raw to the elements, every feeling so intense, sometimes it actually hurts.
Willa is the true Queen of Dreams. Vibrant, vicious, and beautiful.
That she would deign to be marked permanently by me—deign to stain her perfect skin with the touch of death—humbles me in a way I’ve never been before.
So many cower in the face of death, unable to meet the eyes of their end, but Willa—Willa embraces everything I am.
The darkness, the silence, the anger, the relief, the comfort.
She wants all of it.
Her hands go to my hair, her fingers stroking gently until the wave recedes and I’m able to form words.
“Are you sure?”
I don’t want to ask the question—I want to pin her to the bed and tattoo every bit of her skin so everyone in this world and the next knows who she belongs to—but a vulnerable part of me fears I’ve dreamed this up.
Like it isn’t tangible, all feverish colors and blurred lines, too good to be true. Too beautiful to be real.
Willa hooks her fingers beneath my chin. A shiver runs through me at her touch as she pulls my gaze to hers.
“I told you I’ve spent my life in unscathed skin. Nothing in my entire existence has ever left behind anything more than a distant echo. But maybe…maybe it isn’t the curse I thought it was. Maybe it’s a blessing, to only be marked by the deepest things. The truest things.”
The greens and golds of her irises shine behind a sheen of unshed tears, and I feel the echo of them in my soul.
“That is you, Niko. In every life time.” She leans in, the words whispering over my lips like the most sacred of invocations. “Ruin me.”
It feels like a lifetime has passed since Willa first spoke those same words to me on the roof of the Lunaedon. When I’d been ready to sacrifice my kingdom and the mainland beyond it, if only for the chance to give her what she wanted.
We have been torn apart by our circumstances, by our fears, by our hopes, but it is those same things that gave us the strength to fight our way back to each other; the same things that remind us each day how precious what exists between us is.
Willa is threaded through my bones, embedded in my lungs, burrowed into each beat of my heart.
She has changed the very rhythms of my body, both a fated inevitability and a daily choice.
I do as she asks. I pull her to me and ruin her entirely.
I mark her skin with my teeth, mold her body beneath my hands. I fill her and stretch her until her sounds are a sonance that is only ours. Uniquely entwined music, branded by our shared beauty, edged by our shared pain.
And when she shatters apart beneath me, I feel like I could touch each of the pieces—that every one of them embeds beneath my skin, branding me in return.
After, I lay her out on her stomach, and dip the tattoo gun into the first pot of ink.
“For a woman who doesn’t trust anyone, it’s awfully trusting of you to assume I can draw. What if I’m terrible, and tattoo stick figures all over you?”
“What kind of stick figures?” Willa hums in amusement. “Dirty ones, I hope.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re incorrigible.”
“A menace to society, remember?” she laughs, before settling into the bed with a satisfied sigh that lights my blood on fire all over again. “I saw your maps on the Indomnitus…and I knew without even looking at the signature they were yours.”
I trace my fingers over the curve of her spine, imagining a new sort of map—one of us.
“They felt like you, because only you could make something as utilitarian as a map into something so beautiful,” she continues, even as she stills beneath my touch.
“I think there’s room for art in most things if you know where to look.”
I press the needle to her skin and begin a small line.
The air seems to pull taut in anticipation, like Willa and I and perhaps the Lunaedon itself all hold our breath, waiting to see if the ink will disappear.
When it doesn’t, the mark still crisp and dark on the tanned skin of her back, our gaze locks.
And when I give her an affirming nod, I’m struck dumb by the brilliance of her returning smile.
Like being marked by me eternally is the highest honor, when really, it is the other way around.
Willa breathes out slowly as I begin to work in the ink, the design taking a clearer shape in my mind.
“Tell me about them,” she orders. “The maps.”
I oblige. “I started drawing them as a Strayed. To escape the horror beneath the Hollows, I explored every inch of the island, and always sketched what I found. Maybe it was a way to feel connected to a world I could never touch. Or maybe it was simply the motion that calmed my mind. Whatever it was, it became a habit by the time Sam and I left. I drew every world we found, every shore we explored so I could remember the details of each one.”
“I’m sorry you lost them all,” she says softly, her gaze drifting to where Celie’s bracelet is fastened around her wrist. Like Willa believes I’d been forced into a choice between her happiness and my own, when there was no choice at all.
“It’s my own fault. I had over two hundred years to bring them to the Lunaedon, and I never did. I left them to gather dust in the bowels of the Crocodile along with everything else that reminded me of the freedom I once had. The freedom I gave away with my arrogance.”
Willa grows quiet, and for a few long moments, the only sound is the soft buzz of the needle.
“You’re giving it up again if you stay here with me,” she finally says, her tone unreadable.
“Ah, but what you have to understand, Darling, is that there is no horizon I could chase in this world or the next that comes close to the high of loving you. For the first time in centuries, I am happy where I am.”
Happy to revel in the feel of her beneath my hands; in the delicate way she embraces the sharp pain of the needle as I etch the sprawl of our story permanently into her skin.
I add multitudes of color, both because it embodies her magic and because I know she’ll love it.
Willa devours any morsel of beauty like a woman starved, and now, she will be fed by the sight of her own skin.
And when I’m finished hours later, I help her to her feet and lead her to the mirror so she can see the story for herself.
I drink in the spark of her eyes, the part of her wicked mouth; I get dizzy on her gasp of pleasure and the pure joy radiating from her as she takes in the finished piece.
“The seven stars,” she breathes. “Just like you have carved on the headboard. What do they mean?”
I touch the first star at the base of her neck, goosebumps scattering wildly over the sensitive skin.
“It depends which world you’re in. Some say they were gods once that ruled the universe.
Others tell the story of celestial events colliding and bursting into pieces, while there are cultures who believe they are humans sent to the sky to watch over us after their ordinary deaths.
But all the stories share the same basic tenets…
They all believe the stars hold the magic of the universe. ”
I trace the first one, a design all in black that speaks of Willa and I before her fall into Letum. “Fate.”
I drag my finger down to the next star, the one that shines the brightest in our sky and on her skin. The star that cracked open my entire existence when it called her to me. “Possibility.”
Willa exhales a soft sound of pleasure, taking in the undulating design of the words. The way they crash against each other before tangling into one beautiful entity. The tale of when we first met.
My hand trails lower. “The third star…polarity. For everything must have an opposite. An antithesis. And I found mine in you.”
I draw my finger further, tracing the words of our dance together. The push and the pull. The breaking of walls, and the discomfort of healing. “Energy. The universe is in a constant state of movement, and so are we.”
I circle the fifth star. “Rhythm…the cadence of life. Of the air and water. Of the hum of magic and the pulse of blood. The beat of our hearts.” And then the sixth, a wild spill of colors.
“Cessation. As everything has a beginning, everything has an end. Which brings us to the seventh star, essence. The beginning. The life that blooms from an end…from fate, from possibility.”
Before Willa, I thought my heart a rotted, dead thing. But as I take in her happiness, as I see myself marked permanently on her sacred skin, I think it may explode from feeling too alive. Too full. Too everything.
“Our story…woven into the magic of the universe,” she says, still gazing at the tattoo. “Niko, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
She rises to her tiptoes, lacing her fingers in my hair to drag my mouth to hers.
I languish in the indolent exploration of the kiss, the gentle promise that gives rise to violent longings, no matter how many times I possess her.
Before, everything with Willa and I was a rush of ferocity, but now, there is a sanctity in the slowness—in the knowledge that for an entire multitude of worlds, I am the only thing that has made Willa feel safe enough to pause.
And I will forever be grateful that she saw through the death in my veins—through the desperation and the cruelty and the schemes—to know the truth of my heart.
I used to wish so desperately for time to move—to free Letum and live again—but now, I only wish for it to freeze. To pause the enemies coming for both of us, pause the drain of Willa’s magic and the ruination of the island.
And the truth is, I only know one way to freeze time. Perhaps the same thing that made me wish for an end for so many centuries, can now be our new beginning. It will take so much sacrifice on both our parts, but for the chance at eternity—I’ll burn on whatever pyre I need to.
“Willa—"
The rest of the words never make it from my mouth as Willa’s eyes suddenly flash wide in panic. Her hands fly to her chest, as if she means to pull out whatever lives beneath her sternum.
“What is it?” My death has already speared into the air, ready for the invisible threat.
Willa’s expression is grave. “It’s Pan. He’s back.”