Work Text:
golden hour
The sun does not rise over hills: it twists, through valleys and sliding down the narrow, dipping lengths of streams and crooks and little babbling brooks; yellow-cast fingers reach, stretching and stretching and stretching until they are weak and watered-down and translucent like glass, pushing back greyscale shadows with a soft, patient hand, filtered and ferreting and open-palm friendly.
At first, there is still something of the night about it, the dawn - it is still dark overhead, painted over towards the horizon, black-bottomed and midnight-blue swept, and the glow of daylight on the edge is a thick, orange-peel rim, yellow-furred and fluffed up in little, blurred duckling-feather spikes. It touches, tentative, at the bottom of the garden, and it feels fitting that it should not enter, should hover outside leaving the dark locked inside.
It gathers in coils, rising up and threatening to tip over the fence and spill in like a wave; the fence is broken in places, hanging in tattered-shattered pieces.
Above it, falling in limp, cracked curtains, the branches are stripped bare, leaves ripped away: they will lie on the other side, behind the fence, a carpet of ash-coated husks, sucked dry and long-dead, disintegrating to dust as the breeze runs ghost-fingers over to pluck at his hair, whipping it long and windswept-frizzy across his face, red lines across his eyes like thin, slender cuts.
The dawn is cold, ice-blue born, and as he sits there, still and silent and staring, it numbs the litany of cuts etched into his skin across his arms and his cheek and down one side of his neck, slashed across in a long, dragging slice: it twitches when he swallows and it aches.
There is a cut it cannot numb, though, an inch and a half wide and burning an angry, blazing red, blackish and dry and it murmurs to him, thrumming up his arm and straight to his heart with a thumping, shouting hiss.
It is a strange, wriggling pain; it feels alive in that electro-static way that only magic does.
The sun grows steadily, ballooning out from the horizon, squeezing itself out in an orange-yellow blob between the hills, green-drenched and showered in flake-figure trees which sigh in the wind. With a reluctant, regretful air, it creeps through the garden, up and up and up, warm and golden and sweet; it seems to smile as it touches him, bright hands on his knees and a breath over his face, touching fingertips to the cuts and the dipping bowl of his palm where the curse-scar, love-scar stings with biting, clawing teeth.
It is warm but it is cold still, still cold and freshly quick and the dew tastes bitter in his mouth, lemon-bitten and spinning his stomach so he wants to gag, wants to scream himself hoarse.
Butter-yellow and mellow, the light sweeps through the house with a brisk, wild air; it runs through the back door, catching on the windows either side as it goes so it gleams all the way through - it draws lines on Ariana's cheeks, mask-like, wax-like, and settles over the remnants of the house (china and stone and glass-house children) with a gold-silk blanket, translucent and shining and fond: in the end, it steals out of the front door with the echo of laughter and the promise of summer heat, following another thief.
It did not feel much like the scene of a fight; in truth, it had not felt much like a fight at all - but something more like an execution.
The sun rises and the light is more terrible than the dark.