Chapter 7 The Dark Bloom #2
He reached for her, and then stopped, his hand hovering in the air between them, and she could feel the war in him, the collision of duty and desire that raged behind his amber eyes, and the war was not abstract but physical, she could feel it in her own body as a tightening in her chest and a heat in her blood that had nothing to do with the spores and everything to do with the fact that he was close enough to touch and she wanted to touch him with a ferocity that frightened her.
"Can you stand?" he asked, and his voice was rougher than she had ever heard it, stripped of its usual measured cadence, and the roughness did something to her that she was not prepared for, a sensation that started in her belly and spread outward through her limbs like warm water, and she nodded because she did not trust her voice, and he extended his hand, and she took it.
The contact was electric. Not the metaphorical electricity of romance novels but a literal, physical jolt that traveled up her arm and into her chest and then radiated outward through her entire body, and she heard him inhale sharply, felt his fingers tighten around hers, and through the contact she was flooded with an emotional resonance so powerful and so complex that it drove every other sensation from her mind like wind scattering leaves.
She felt his loneliness. It was not the quiet, manageable loneliness of an evening spent alone or a life lived in a small town where everyone knew your name but no one knew your heart.
It was a loneliness of geological scale, an ancient, monumental emptiness that had been carved into the foundation of his being over three thousand years, since the moment Lyra died in the Descent and took with her the
Bond that had anchored him to the world.
The Bond, she understood now, had been more than a connection.
It had been a part of him, a chamber in his emotional architecture as vital as his heart, and when Lyra died, that chamber had not emptied but collapsed, leaving a void where something essential had been, and the void had never healed, because in the Umbral Realm, Bonds were sacred and irreplaceable, and a being who had lost their Bonded partner did not recover but learned to function around the wound, the way a tree grows around a deep scar, its bark thickening, its roots compensating, but the scar remaining, always, a place where the living wood had been replaced by something harder and denser and dead.
And beneath the loneliness, she felt the longing.
It was the same longing she had glimpsed when she touched his arm in the clearing, but now, amplified by the Dark Bloom and transmitted through the direct contact of their hands, it was so vivid and so detailed that she could almost see its shape, a vast, dark, beautiful thing that reached toward her through the space between their bodies with the slow inevitability of a tide.
He wanted. The Warden of the Shadow Garden, who had held himself apart from emotional entanglement for three millennia, wanted, and what he wanted was not abstract but specific and immediate and terrifyingly clear: he wanted to stop fighting.
He wanted to let go of the control that was killing him by inches.
He wanted to feel something that was not duty and not grief and not the cold, careful calculation of a man who has made the preservation of his realm the only acceptable substitute for the preservation of his own heart. And he was terrified of it.
*** Malakor pulled her to her feet and guided her through the spore-thick air with a hand on her lower back, his touch firm and steady and deliberately placed in a location that was practical rather than intimate, and Sera understood the deliberateness because she could feel it, could feel the effort it cost him to keep his hand in that safe, utilitarian position when every fiber of his being, amplified by the Dark Bloom, was straining toward something else.
They moved through the luminous fog together, and the Garden around them was transformed, every surface blazing with emotional color, the trees pulsing in slow, deep waves of violet and gold, the ferns rippling in fields of pink and amber, the air so thick with spores that each breath was like drinking liquid light.
He brought her to a shelter he knew, a hollow beneath the roots of one of the oldest amethyst trees in the Glade, a space where the massive root structure formed a natural canopy that blocked the worst of the spore-cloud and created a pocket of relatively clear air.
He ducked beneath the lowest root and drew her in after him, and the shelter was small, barely large enough for two people to sit, and when they were both inside, the root-canopy above them glowed with a deep, steady purple that was almost soothing after the chaos outside.
They sat with their backs against the living wood, and the space between them was perhaps a foot, and in that foot of shadow-scented air, Sera could feel every emotion he was experiencing as clearly as if they were her own, and she knew, with the same terrible clarity, that he could feel hers.