Chapter 7 The Dark Bloom #4
mewhere deeper than his throat, from the place where the loneliness lived, and the words were not a command but a plea, and the plea was not for permission but for salvation, because if she did not tell him to stop, he was not certain he could stop himself, and stopping was the only thing that stood between them and something that neither of them was ready for.
Sera opened her mouth. The spores swirled.
His fingers hovered, trembling now, a millimeter from her skin, and she could feel the shadow between them resonating with the intensity of their combined desire, could feel it building toward something that the Garden itself seemed to anticipate, the root-walls pulsing faster, their purple light deepening toward a color that was almost red, and she wanted, oh, she wanted, with a wanting that was so total and so consuming that it obliterated every rational thought in her head, and the word that rose to her lips was not stop but please, and she knew, with the clarity that the Dark Bloom imposed on everything, that if she said please, he would not stop, and if he did not stop, neither would she, and what would happen in this shelter, under the roots of the oldest amethyst tree in the Silver Glade, would change the shape of everything that came after.
She said nothing. The silence held. His hand trembled.
The spores swirled. And then, with a slowness that was the most painful thing Sera had ever witnessed, Malakor lowered his hand.
He pulled it back from her face and set it on his knee, and the motion was deliberate and controlled and cost him something that she felt leave his body like heat leaving a fire that has been doused, and his amber eyes closed, and when they opened again, the rawness was still there but it was behind the mask now, pressed back behind the familiar walls of Warden's composure, and the walls were cracked and bleeding light but they were standing, and that, apparently, was enough.
The Dark Bloom was fading. Sera could feel it in the air, the density of the spore-cloud diminishing as the Garden's flora completed its release cycle and returned to its normal state of bioluminescence.
The light outside the shelter was softening, the wild, chaotic colors settling back into the familiar silver sheen, and the emotional amplification was receding like a tide, pulling back from the shores of her consciousness and leaving behind a shoreline that was exposed and vulnerable and littered with the debris of everything she had felt and revealed.
The silence that followed the Bloom's passing was different from the silence that had preceded it.
It was not the held-breath anticipation of a world about to transform but the stunned, slightly shell-shocked quiet of two people who have been through something overwhelming together and have not yet found the words to process what happened.
Malakor rose first, his movements careful and controlled, and he did not offer her his hand this time, and the absence of the offer was a deliberate act, a re-imposition of the distance that the Dark Bloom had dissolved, and Sera felt the loss of it like a physical ache.
"Return to your quarters," he said, and his voice was the voice of the Warden again, measured and authoritative and stripped of every trace of the rawness she had witnessed in the shelter, and the transformation was so complete, so brutally effective, that it was almost more devastating than the vulnerability it replaced, because it told her that what she had seen in him was real and that he was choosing to bury it, and the choice was not cruelty but self-preservation, and the distinction did not make it hurt any less.
He turned and walked away from her, his long stride carrying him through the thinning fog with a purpose that was almost desperate, and Sera watched him go, her hand still raised to the place on her cheek where his fingers had almost touched, and the last of the spores settled around her like silver snow, and the Garden returned to its quiet, luminous normalcy, and she was alone.
But she was not the same alone she had been before.
The shelter behind her still held the heat of his body and the echo of his loneliness and the ghost of his almost-touch, and she could feel all of it resonating in the hollow spaces of her chest, filling them with something that was not quite love and not quite need but was too large and too specific to be called anything else, and she pressed her back against the amethyst tree's roots and breathed, and the tree pulsed once, a slow, deep throb of purple light that moved through the bark and into her spine, and she understood, with a clarity that the fading Bloom left behind like a gift, that the moment in the shelter had changed something permanent between them, and neither distance nor duty nor the Warden's mask would ever be able to fully undo what the Dark Bloom had revealed.