Daylight slit the throat of the sky and from the horizon bled forth the bubbling heat of the sun's plasmic projection, the red rays of a new day. They seeped into the clouds and colored the sky a demure blush above the light weaver's temple, where inside waited the cosmically consecrated streams and shards of hydrargyrous scintilla. Alois did not keep her waiting long.
Into her doorway he spilled like that sun, swaddled in fabric the color of a cramoisy clot, a cane clutched by his right hand. Without tears or hesitation, the summoned alchemist simply smiled.
She could feel him. From the moment her cannibal sun bird took wing she could feel his feet touch masonry, cross wood and water. When she ran her fingers across the lip of her altar, under the fur to the candor of the chipping wood, the peeling paint.
There were splinters beneath her nails.
Every moment she waited there was another and another. She marked the minutes in tiny hisses.
Tiny, imperceptible hisses, kept cloistered in her virgin breaths, nunnery lungs.
She curled her fingers to her chest and began to pick today's strings when she felt him on her steps, felt his hands upon her door.
Today, the thread was a rose gold sunstream.
The colour of swansong lips.
"I was thinking of you."
"So said the sun," Alois spoke, "the bird, the string; I felt it."
He moved in a wavering gate forward, abandoning the daylight to bask in her ecclesial starshine. "My heart was beating for you."
"Give me your hand," she whispered, barely breathing. Each step he took strummed the air like skipping stones. There were rings and rings and rings around his footsteps and they made her flicker,
made her fade.
There was blood under her nails when she offered it to her side, back still turned. She waited for him to obey.
When his skin met hers it was chilled with the morning air, the walk from Warwick to her church. He cradled the limb in his own with great care and even greater concern for the sanguine slivers tucked in her flesh, though the latter had not reached his expression.
He exhaled a breath, happy to, again, be in her company.
She felt the furrow in his brow all the same when she turned on him, placed his hand to her chest beneath the unbuttoned fabric of her collar,
drug him to the ground.
She folded her limbs beneath her as her body waxed and waned, thread still in her free hand-- and though she had no recollection of near nor far, the pair were too close for comfort.
Alois would be a dead man if Gamorath came through those old chapel doors, but Toska cared not.
She could feel him breathing through her closed eyes, feel his fingers tremble against her sternum armor, marrow tough.
Bowed head, intangible silence,
heady indulgence.
And this was all, the only movement she allowed him as her head dipped deeper, deeper still-- till her chin touched her clavicles and her breath trespassed the man's fingertips curled against her skin.
She held up her other hand, thread of light between her fingers.
"Take this from me."
Crumpled at the side of the light weaver, Alois dropped his cane to stretch his unoccupied hand out to grasp at the sun-spun string, ever obedient to the directions he was given.
He closed his fingers.
And closed them again.
And again, but his skin did not take, and the thread did not budge.
"I… can't." he said with strained reluctance. Reiterated in defeat, "I can't."
She took his jaw into her hand, searing thread pressed white hot to his cheek. Those weaver hands held him fast, glued to her heart in the dead silence of the candlelit morning. Finally she cracked those dawn laden eyes and how those mirrors spun-- the threads flit from corner to corner, rearranging, circumventing until all those baubles and shards fell still once more, awaiting their mistress' word.
"Why can't you?"
"Perhaps, I, uh."
Where the light weaver opened her eyes, the alchemist closed his, brow knitting in pure reaction to the thread against his cheek. Though he had never had this distinct feeling while in the priestess of light's company before, he was wholly unsure, and completely at her mercy.
"I don't know," he continued, "perhaps I'm not worthy."
"Look into me," the woman commanded, pulling him closer. Softer, then. "Look at me."
She rolled that thread across his cheek and how it burned like the fire of Olsir funeral pyres against his skin.
He strained to follow the command, through the pain on his skin, wanting only to clamp his lids tighter, and fold in upon himself as the woman had done earlier. From the corners of his eyes fell rivulets of saline, rolling down to gather upon his clutched jaw, upon her hands.
He inhaled slowly. His pupils of blue were surrounded by a red stress.
"Shhh, Alois. You've come so far," the lightweaver cooed, murmured as she pressed her threaded palm to the palm that had failed before. She could taste the breath of his body, feel the heat of his blush rising in waves.
Laced their fingers, wove their skins.
"I'm sorry," he said with words barely a whisper, wealthy with disappointment. It was all he could muster where excuses were irrelevant.
The kiss she gifted him was light, chaste, docile-- but the thread she left in his hand was electric, was fire.
"You've come so far."
The kiss was forgotten for the flame in his fingers. Alois' vision fell, his voice minute, rumbling with the undertones of the waver that previously quaked his flesh upon hers.
"I don't know what to do with this. What do I do with this?"
"You hold it." Cloistered fingers pulled closer, closer still, the heat of the Priestess' heartbeat humming with the heat of her fervency. "I just needed to know you could."
Her pale eyes fell closed. The mirrors trembled with that door slammed shut and she prayed, oh how she prayed.
"Do you hurt?"
Her proximity was such to where the alchemist felt like he would melt into the priestess. Maybe he would; maybe he had started to. The heat in the air touched his flushed, fire-touched cheeks, and his sight focused upon a pinpoint light in the distance.
"Yes, but I think that maybe I should."
"You are the only man I've allowed to feel my heartbeat, to touch the fluttering of my lungs." The words were bleak in their quietude. "So perhaps you should."
In every light there was a shadow, in every shadow there lived light.
Atonement was a word used by d'Iacrit and Toska had never really known its meaning. In Olsirfell, they had words like vengeance and guilt. She didn't know sin, only mien.
She pulled his hand from her chest and let him have it back as she pinned her buttons back together one by one.
The separation was jarring, for Alois immediately tucked his hand against his chest in a gesture that was self-conscious. His other hand gripped tighter around the fray of light he had been gifted.
"It means so much to me," he said, shifting to stand, "You mean so much to me. I would give you my heart completely. Take if from my chest and keep it for yourself."
The little woman looked at the alchemist with placid eyes, steady gaze, before her eyes turned down, to pick at the splinters under her nails. She snapped a thread, snapped another, wove a needle to cauterize her own wounds.
"If I took it from you it would cease its beat, and I already know that the only one it beats for is me."
"Would you not find such stillness comforting? That it would have settled its anxiety enough to rest peacefully in your astral aura? Forgive me, priestess, it is a morbid, but comforting thought for me." Retrieving his cane to steady himself, Alois took a few steps backward.
"Would it bother you if I were to meditate in the back row, or would you prefer solitude?"
"It is not morbid, Alois," she hummed so softly. "It is not yet time to rest. There are many things you must do before you can find peace." She stood and pulled him closer, to kiss his forehead-- motherly now with her collar buttoned tight. "But when it is time for you to rest, you may rest here in my hands. I will take your heart before your body burns upon the pyre. Now come-- you may meditate with me."
And when she was seated on her altar, she sang him soft hymns of the old world in their old world tongue-- delicate woven tapestries of light and voice, voice and light.