Can one mourn another who lives? A flicker of yellow in my view, a gentle voice in my ear that rouses me. Only to have me wake and weep, crestfallen. 

He waits for me, I wait for him. I cannot linger. Such we promised time, time again. Such we break. For his touch brings me muted agony, that my heart presses into shattered glass, that my eyes bleed with liquid so transparently thin. 

But to be without him, I cannot tell which is the greater evil. For the emptiness of the spaces between these fingers is none so much more painful than how his own wrap around my wrists. 

Though with pain there is beauty. Beauty and charm. He clothes himself in it, he masks himself in power. For what is he without these bonds? These bonds that cut into his steel lined skin. Only I unravel him, only I lap the ichor from his wounds and paint his faded edges. He smiles, and I feel myself break once more. 

I kneel, my knees drawn to my chest. Agony. What is life if I cannot caress his hair, what is life if I cannot once more be soothed with gentle words in such a tone as his own? I rise, I leap, I stumble down to where the water flows cyclical and forever. Into an endless dark lit only by the thousand stars. 

With a bare hand, a mortal hand, I reach for the brightest. Enclose my hand, burning fire upon fire. I beg, I summon, and scream. For the hundred times I have done this, a hundred times I will do this more. For his sake. For mine. 

There I lay. The fire long dissipated. I wait. I wait. Grains of sand that tickle my skin. I wait. I wait. 

Then a soft shuffling, a sound of feet landing. I turn, a flicker of yellow in my view.