#poem i wrote for paya is up there too

[the-one-who-lambs]

"live again" (Hannah writes narilamb for @xmajordumps because their AU absolutely fucks)

A rock is eroded over millions of years. The most minuscule raindrops whittle away at it because they persist. Its razor-sharp edges become soft and rounded, battered by incessant efforts to smooth it.

Retaliatory claws sink into them. They cannot remember how many times his obsidian revenge has anointed their skin. Eternity will meld into forgiveness; neither remembers who spoke it first. Time and time again the Lamb chooses kindness to answer him. Every antipromise he has unearthed about how they should treat him is honeyed, discordant. Mercy does not define the existence he would choose, until it does. Vanishingly small is the line dividing sinners and saints. It blurs: an eclipse of the blood they once drew.

The Lamb spent their entire life running. First from the Bishops as flames guide their footsteps, then charging towards them with ice in their veins. They finally settle and the world moves too slowly beneath their feet.

What stands in his place is now You. No self they have constructed has ever been more true, dormant in that restless grave. Their breath would not have been their own if he hadn’t been so selfish. The biting cold fills their lungs, a hollow defeat. They go back to him. His arms are warm again. They do not ask who inflicted the scars upon them, lest their reflection shows someone else’s face, or worse, their own. A shadow loves the sun for creating it, a monochrome facsimile of its forbearer. Inseparable but never meant to touch. They defied the story yet unwritten for them.

They trace the constellations and map their youth, stellar temples of the versions of each other they will never know.

They don’t fear death. Dying for each other could scarcely be called martyrdom. Living, however, is a vow of sacrifice, a splendor so unmeasurable it perhaps does not exist at all. They don’t need to sleep, anymore. Nightly, they hold each other and close their eyes, and grieve not the eternity they share. It’s a soft peace, a long-fought, raindrop-born glory.

They are sworn to the darkness bright within them and uphold their shared devotion, unrepentant.