#love love loved azris week im so glad i decided to participate!!

[mudandmire]

Solstice & Autumn Equinox

Azris Week - Day 7: Solstice & Autumn Equinox

~~~ aH. I promise I have the thing look see here it is. It's the last day of @azrisweek :(( (shhh pretend I got this out yesterday) and I'm literally gonna miss it so much. This was so fun, I know I keep saying that but I can't put into words the kind of vigor and excitement for writing this brought in me. I'm so grateful to everyone for this event, and especially for all the lovely, talented people participating. Now I actually have the time to read your things I'm so p u m p e d. Anyway, hope you enjoy lovelies <3 :D ~~~

Longest Night

There are ninety days between the Autumn Equinox and what is now the darkest day of the year, the Winter Solstice. This far north, in the wild steppes of Illyria, the sun doesn’t rise past the jagged peaks of the Illyrian mountains. It’s muted, golden light tinged blue with the ever-present darkness, and floods the fields and plains for only three hours. Before the moon and her necklace of beaded stars takes it’s place again.

Azriel sits in the dark, frost crawling up the pane of his little window. The same one he’d grown up with. He watches it from his place of the bed of pelts and quilts he’s nearly outgrown.

The journal Eris gave him years ago lays splayed open on his lap—the spine creased, the pages cleaved in half to reveal it’s thread-bare center, mirroring how Azriel’s feeling. Alone on the darkest and longest night of the year: a time for patience, remembrance, and wishes.

Wishes of a good harvest the coming year, plentiful enough to beat hunger back. Remembrance of the long nights past, when Azriel would curl up under the pelts, throw his pillow over his head and pretend that it was light outside and it was only his pillow that made it dark. Patience for whatever the stars give him; their blessings, no matter his circumstance, worked out in his good.

Azriel twirls his charcoal pencil in his fingers, fidgeting restlessly as he chases around a thought like a hound to a rabbit.

Wishes for Eris, maybe. Nothing specific—Azriel doesn’t know what he’d wish for in specifics, jotted out line by line in his head like some list he presents to the unfeeling sky to be fulfilled. Just health, happiness, his presence.

He doesn’t write any of it down, not in this journal. In fact he won’t ever write this down, too private and personal to ever be given life in the form of his harried, smudged strokes of writing.

Because there’s another wish—three in total, now—that has lied buried, dormant. With every look at the elegantly penned, quick, coiled lines of Eris’s writing, it grows teeth and a belly and hungers.

The charcoal pencil pauses between his middle and pointer finger and he lays down, careful of his folded wings behind him. Azriel swallows hard against the rising tide of want, burning like a thousand little stars in his chest. It’s not so much as a wish than a want, but for the sake of tonight he’ll combine the two.

Azriel’s hand, as if spurred on like a cattle prod to the flank, jolts where it was resting lazily on his stomach. It jumps, scars and calluses and all the ingrained lines of it, to the swell of his shoulder. Warm to the touch, nearly burning, the pads of his fingers trace it—trying not to think of how broad he’s gotten. How Eris had followed, but still remained lithe, his strength in his sinewy muscles, in the jut of his stubborn chin and the hardness of his amber eyes.

He fails miserably, his eyes fluttering closed as his touch trails across to his collarbone. One hand stays on the open pages of the journal, yearning scrawled silently between every word, and lets his breathlessness overcome him in the dark when he thinks of the pale hollow of Eris’s throat.

It’s a gentle thing—both his touch and his admiration—but he fears that the longer he stays away from Eris, and Eris from him, it’ll grow into something ravenous. If the faint tremble of his fingers haven’t crossed that line already. He won’t manage this delicate longing if the nights stretch on still and the days tick up to one hundred—two hundred, and on and on.

The pad of his thumb brushes the same hollow, the ridges of his scars an awkward sensation against the thundering of his pulse.

What he would give, what he would give, what he would give.

His lungs stutter, caught in the hold of his gripping desire and his hand moves quickly. As if knowing staying there will undo him completely: the seams of his journal, the tears against his sanity.

The hand moves up, tracing the line of his throat, and then curves against the angle of his jaw. Stubbled and coarse from days without shaving.

Eris has freckles here—he knows, he’s seen them. And there’s one, his fingers already following the path of his memory, that lies right behind his ear. Skin that has never been touched, never been kissed by the sun, so pale it’s nearly translucent. Azriel would find it, a dearly missed lover, and keep it a secret with his lips.

His head is a mess, the heavy pound of his heart against his sternum echoing up to his head. He can feel the blood pulse behind his eyes where they remain closed, content to bask in the water color paintings of his desires. Every strand of thought follows no continuous path—where his hands touch changes under his fingers till there’s freckles, moonlight-soaked skin, and the most dangerous tilt to pink lips.

The hand on his journal presses down. He knows the parchment is folding around the sweat of his palm, his fingers, and doesn’t quite care if anything gets smudged in response.

Eris had written to him earlier. Innocuous and simple—a wish of his own he shared to Azriel with the simplest of strokes of ink.

‘Tell me what the stars look like, tonight.’

Azriel’s head falls back, hair feathering over the sheen of sweat on his forehead. Warm air shudders from his lungs like it has no place to be held anymore as his calloused fingers brush against his lips.

There’s a pinch between his brows, mouth fallen open in night-drenched silence, when he thinks back:

You, they look like you.

It goes no further than his lips. Azriel’s touch knows his own bounds, presses no harder than the gentlest of kisses and though he aches something fierce, he stops it there. He wishes there was more shame when he brings his fingers away and they shine with the traces of his tongue. Yet there is nothing but the lingering, ever present longing, curled up like a slumbering beast with one eye open—aware of it all.

He watches the rise and fall of his stomach, gleaming in the moonlight, and sighs deeply to calm the racing of his heart. He may as well have just leaped off a cliff, he can see his pulse rabbit under the tender skin of his wrists.

When Azriel lifts his other hand from the journal, the parchment sticks to his palm before letting go and fluttering back down. He can feel a burn of something hot against the hinge of his jaw, the shell of his ears.

He sits up, his charcoal pencil buried under his thigh where he had dropped it in his mindless pursuit of touch. His fingers tremble slightly when he sets the blackened edge to the page, wincing at the smudges he sees on his previous words.

‘They’re beautiful, you should visit to see them sometime.’ The lingering tinge of his desire has slipped into his letters—Azriel can’t bring himself to care enough to dial it back. He wants, he knows he wants, he can’t go another ninety days without seeing the gleam of Eris’s amber eyes in person.

He waits for Eris’s response. Sitting up fully with his pillows behind him, against the sensitive membrane of his wings, and a quilt over his lap. The night stays constant as he moves around, shifting and resettling, it never wavers and never judges. It’s like he hadn’t indulged at all; and according to the moon’s indifferent gaze, he hadn’t.

Eris writes back a heartbeat after Azriel’s fully settled in bed.

‘Soon,’ he writes, pausing slightly, ‘I miss them.’

Azriel’s heart kicks against his ribs, a wild animal in a cage, and he has to bite down on his bottom lip to keep his grin contained.

His thumb brushes against Eris’s imprinted words; the perfect swirl of his penmanship, the slight hesitancy between his confession. Secret, wished, safe.

‘They miss you too, tatlım.’

~~///~~///~~///~~

Damn alright so. That's it I guess! Short for today, though I kinda prefer it that way. I tried to make it longer but all the ways I did just didn't fit right so, eh whatever I'm happy with it. If you can tell that this circles back around to my first post of azris week I'm literally in love with you thanks.

Thank you again for reading and the kind comments and reposts - you guys gave me the biggest smile and the most lovely experience, so thank you <3