Work Text:
Mal dreamt of blood in a sunlit pasture.
A young girl was standing over him as he struggled to breathe through the pain, her black plait coming undone around her shocked face. The long stalks of grass surrounding them were cut in a strange way, too sharp at such an angle, as if…as if… Shadows billowed around them as a scream pierced the air, and all he then knew was the taste of blood and darkness.
And Mal woke up again.
For a half-second, in that place between dreams and wakefulness, he was a child holding the broken pieces of a wooden toy. He had a sister. A mother and father. Dunya Morozova’s life had been a small one before being thrown in the water, or at least what he’d gathered from Alina. She must have passed her power on to her descendants, built into their bones…
This was his family legacy, after all. Shadow and bones linking themselves into the framework of their land. He wondered how much of it was even left in this new world of theirs.
Despite the summer heat, Mal shivered under thin cotton blankets. Alina stirred next to him. Her hair glowed in the moonlight. He reached out and curled a wayward piece around a finger. He studied the sharp angles of her face, her serious eyes fluttering under pale eyelids.
He saw the girl in the manor standing in a sunbeam. The soldier exploding into light in the Fold. The saint wearing a crown of driftwood. This was all Alina. Always making her way through the darkness, his wife, his nation. He recited a line from their vows, the promise he intended to keep to his last breath.
As Mal was falling back to sleep, the memory of her wrapped in gossamer strands of sunlight was enough to bring him to nicer dreams. She brought him home.