#another short angsty oneshot by me at my busiest

[the-liars-art]

Terminus

Night Haunter/Jago Sevatarion. CW: a bit of gore, character death (hasn’t actually happened)

In the dream Sevatar held something in his arms. It was heavy, heavier than anything he’d lifted and held before, pulling him back to the snare of wet stone floorings that shone in distant candlelight. No thought occupied his strained, burning mind except to take the thing away from wherever he was. To keep it guarded and treasured forever. He didn’t remember holding onto material treasure this great, this horribly adored. In his dream his vision was clear in the dark, yet he dared not look down. The thing was warm between his bare hands and chest, the wet hair covering it tangled with his fingers like chains and nooses, but they had no power to hold themselves onto him. They clung in vain. Muscles and joints of his superhuman arms were sore and creaking, but he couldn’t recall anything aside from the desperation of hugging the thing so tightly to himself. It was definite, and so, so heavy.

In the dream he walked still, dragging each step across the floor while his arms almost gave out with their effort. All else mattered not. Eventually his knees bent to the weight first, falling in a coagulated puddle before him. The thing slipped from his embrace onto the floor beneath, but instinctively his drenched fingers caught strands of its ragged hair, so it did not roll away. Relieved that he did not lose it to the darkness, he gained one more ounce of strength to finally set his teeth through the formless pain and look down over his gripped hands.

All sounds ceased and emptied from his ears, and his hearts stopped beating all at once. The severed head, wrapped in its own hair, greeted him in silence like the reflection of a pearly moon in still water. Night Haunter’s visage had never been as genuine, satisfied, at peace. Though as bloodless as they were alive, those thin lips no longer twist and sneer in bitter rage or agony. The brows and closed eyes rested, like the most gentle touches of a portrait on oil-smooth canvas. A dark spill of blood stained the jaw, the chin, and across what remained of the cleanly severed neck. Some more were smudged over the scarred face by the hurried handling in encumbered arms. All he could do was to fall on his hands and knees as the dull pain in his own skull sharpened into screams, then the crimson at the corner of his father’s mouth spread and swallowed his vision like a second nightfall.

Sevatar awoke shrouded in a different darkness, eyes sore as if he was going to cry for the first time in decades, but no tears came. He was curled up and comfortably warm as his senses returned from the nightmare, of which details were escaping his eidetic memory. He could recall blood, a painful effort, losing something that left him weak, nothing more. He tried to move but he was held back by arms as unmoving as veins and ridges of adamantine under the hive cities of Nostramo.

He could hear the beat of his lord Night Haunter’s primary heart, deep and much slower than his own, and the steady breathing in contrast to his shallow nightmare-ridden gasps. Good. At least he remembered why he had been asleep in the first place. The memory of his nightmare was slipping away even faster now, but he did not care the slightest. Sevatar was simply pleased that he did not wake up screaming again, or he would have disturbed his lord’s precious rest. He closed his eyes, and all the troubled thoughts cleared again.