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The first woman Aleksander truly loves is a Heartrender, Solveig, tall and proud and powerful.
He has dallied with women before her, and will love others when she is gone, but nothing can ever quite match a first love and nothing ever tries.
They meet in her father's smithy, staring at each other wide-eyed across the dying form of the man who's fingers still hold his sword so tightly that his knuckles show yellow.
Her hands are frozen in mid-motion, his slowly lowering after sending the Cut through the now lifeless piece of flesh on the floor.
Neither of them says a word.
Then she sighs, and then sends him a firm, slightly wobbly smile, and his heart skips a beat.
They flee her village, leaving her pyre unlit behind them.
Somewhere between that nameless village and his rendevous with his mother, the two of them become one.
Solveig is fierce and idealistic, determined to change the world through sheer force of will.
And Aleksander?
He is young and hopeful still, young enough that her vision catches in him like a fire and remains as a smouldering ember for the rest of his life - hers is the idea for impenetrable kefta to protect Grisha, for their people to wring a palace from the Tsar, and so much more.
He had always dreamed of creating a safe haven for Grisha, but the first time that dream is solidified into a plan is with her.
It is her fire for the cause that drives him, even centuries later when his own flame has burned low.
When he walks through the palace that houses the Second Army, even after so many years divide the Darkling from hopeful, besotted Aleksander, there are so many little details that remind him of her.
It hurts sometimes to see how deeply rooted in him this first love of his remains, but it is a good hurt - though time has erased all trace of her existence, as long as he endures and carries the memory of her with him, she will never truly be gone.
It is a comfort, when the long years stretch on without end and he feels an ache in his bones for all those he has loved and lost.
Sometimes, he will see echoes of her in the Grisha he protects.
The fierce smile on a face the first time something bends to their will.
The delighted laugh of one glorying in their gift.
The sharp motions of the Corporalki in their element.
The protective set of a mother's shoulders.
They never had children, though not for lack of trying, but he thinks if they had, it would have felt similar to see these living reminders of her.
He has never found a Heartrender as powerful as her, before or since, nor one as fearless.
Baghra had not approved of her as long as she lived.
She had never spoken ill of Solveig after her death, though she had not been so kind to others whom he had loved.
He likes to think that if Solveig had been longer lived, his mother would have liked her.
That was her main complaint, voiced loudly and often whenever she was reminded of Solveig's prescence - "she is a Heartrender, boy, not one of us. How long do you think she will live? A century? Two? And how much is that compared with eternity?"
He is forced to admit, when she dies before she reaches two hundred, that even the longest mortal lifespan feels painfully short compared to eternity.
For the first time, he curses his immortality, and understands why his mother despises it.
How he desperately wishes that he could have grown old with her, grey haired and aching but still in love (still whole, still human), and died with her.
He would have been buried beside her.
The world would have forgotten him, but he would have been with her and that would have been enough.
It is after her death that he first takes up painting, as a way to distract himself from the howling grief eating him up alive.
He discovers a talent for it.
The first thing he does, as soon as he has the skill, is paint her.
Not the way she died, old, scared and afraid, hunted like an animal until the day she died.
No, he paints her the way she lives on in his memory - young, proud and fierce.
He immortalises her without a thread of gray in her hair, her blue eyes clear and unclouded.
He cannot quite capture her smile - the twist of her lips, the way her eyes flashed, the set of her browd.
Centuries later, when that first portrait is long lost and most likely destroyed, he paints her again.
This time he shows her power, her glory.
He paints her hands plucking the threads of life with the skill of a bard, tall and confident, victorious.
This time, he clothes her in Corporalki red, embroidered with Heartrender black.
This time, he places the portrait in the entrance of the Little Palace.
She had been born nearly a millennium too early to see their dream come true.
The least that he can do is to allow their fulfilled dream to include her - to ensure that every Grisha and otkazat'sya to enter or leave the domain of the Second Army must look upon the face of the woman who first dreamed of it.
He does not explain who she was to anyone, or where the portrait came from.
Some things are private, guarded within the heart, and his first love is no secret but neither is her tale one he wishes to see sensationalised into meaninglessness.
No.
Better to keep the truth of her to himself, uncorrupted by the world.
He has lost too many pieces of himself to give up this one also.
***************
He travels aimlessly for a while after he loses Solveig, for a year and then two and before he knows it more than a century and a half has passed.
He ends up somewhere in the north of Ravka, near the Fjerdan border, and that is where he meets Elizaveta.
His second wife is a Healer, the daughter of a priest who loved her enough to turn a blind eye on her gift.
She is kind and gentle and possessed of a soul so pure that Aleksander feels blinded when he looks into her eyes.
There is also a steel backbone to her that he cannot bend in the slightest.
It is the first thing he finds truly fascinating since he sank into a haze of existential grief after Solveig's death - Elizaveta refuses to allow him to manipulate or control her.
She, so gentle and sweet, stands firm where others far more powerful have failed, and that intrigues him.
Baghra will bend before his pleading eyes, Solveig would laughingly allow his machinations, women of all kinds swoon at a glance from him, and yet this quiet priest's daughter refuses to move an inch.
Fascinated, he travels with her a week, then a month, then a year, and all the while the heavy weight of grief lifts day by day.
He finds a new form of love.
Not the all-encompassing, all-consuming passion he had shared with Solveig.
A quiet, steady affection that grows slowly but surely into something strong.
They are married by a wandering priest, because she will not allow him to seduce her outside of wedlock, try as he might.
After that, he brings her back to meet Baghra, who is dismissive if not as cutting as she could be.
"Sweet," his mother says disdainfully, "but at least she doesn't give you your way."
They don't visit his mother much, but when they do Elizaveta ignores everything Baghra doesn't say directly to her, and Baghra generally ignores her existence.
Mostly they live in a little hut in the mountains, away from the world, content to live together simply.
Well, Elizaveta is content.
Aleksander has many lifetimes to spend however he pleases, but only one lifetime he can spend with Elizaveta.
She dies peacefully, a little under a century after their marriage, and he buries her in a meadow of alpine flowers.
He does not mourn her as he mourned Solveig - his first wife was ripped from him by time, and they had both been in denial of the truth up until the moment she breathed her last.
Elizaveta had always known he would outlive her, and had accepted it with the resolute grace he loved her so much for.
She is at peace, and he envies her, but does not desecrate her memory by falling into another wild, mindless fit of grief.
He mourns her, but does not lose himself in the mourning, for all that he buries a part of his heart with her.
She would not have wanted that.
So he leaves her to rest in a meadow of wild mountain flowers, leaves the little hut to fall into decay and ruin, and descends back into the long struggle.
The moment he reaches a town where he can buy paints and brushes, he paints her.
He does not immortalise her as he did Solveig, does not make her ever young and beautiful - he paints crows feet about her eyes and silver threads in her golden hair, and wilting flowers in her hands.
Elizaveta taught him the importance of letting go, and he wants to remember that.
Then he returns to Baghra, who occasionally mutters about 'silly religious twits' turning his head, but otherwise remains silent on the matter.
It took time for him to come to terms with Solveig's death in a way he does not need for Elizaveta.
Death had been a cruel thief when he lost Solveig, stealing away his love before his ready.
With Elizaveta, death had been a natural continuation of her life, not something to mourn and rage against.
He paints her only once more in all the long years of his life, shortly after he paints Solveig again - it feels all too natural to continue to Elizaveta.
He sets her in the meadow of alpine flowers he buried her in all those years ago, her hands full of them - some fresh, some wilting, some dead.
Gives her the red kefta she was born centuries to early to wear.
Then he hangs her in the wing of the Little Palace claimed by the Healers, where she can gaze down on her legacy, and those who follow in her footsteps.
*************
He doesn't marry for a while after Elizaveta's death.
Oh there are women, of course, he isn't a monk, but there are no loves.
Dalliances, affairs, trysts, but his heart is never involved.
The next time he falls in love, properly in love, he is in the west, by the sea, just under a century later.
Ksena is a Fabrikator in a village small enough that everyone knows everyone and is willing to keep even treasonous secrets.
She is brash and confident and alive, and he cannot take his eyes from her.
Before he knows quite what has happened, he is hers.
She teaches him to sail a fishing boat and mend a net, and rewards him with kisses every time he gets something right.
Luckily for him, he is a fast learner.
He spends a year with her by the sea, learning to fish and sail and swim in the strongest current.
At the end of the year, he leaves and Ksena goes with him.
She is curious about the wider world and bored of the monotonous life of the little fishing village.
Now it is his turn to teach her.
He shows her how to climb mountains and live off the land, and rewards her with kisses every time she gets something right.
Luckily for him, she is a fast learner.
They wander Ravka together, learning new things with every step they take, seeing wonder born anew in the familiar.
When they chance to meet his mother in their travels, Baghra cannot get a word in edgewise, silenced by Ksena's obnoxious, happy chatter.
She grumbles off on her own journey after only a few weeks, and Ksena turns to Aleksander with a mischievous grin and a satisfied air.
He laughs so hard that he nearly cries.
Baghra never does like Ksena - after her death she will grumble about 'that overconfident nothing' from time to time, and Aleksander will pretend he hasn't heard her.
They wander Ravka together after that, hiding their abilities and otherwise free of care, turning even the worst peril into a game to laugh at.
Aleksander never forgets his desire to save Grisha from their persecution, but Ksena's carefree laughter is intoxicating and he has many lifetimes after all.
He can more than afford to spend one with her, but he doesn't get the chance to.
Ksena is taken from him by the Fjerdan border and burned by a mindless mob, who cheer and howl like animals as she screams.
He only finds her when her voice finally cracks and goes silent.
No one in that crowd survives, cut down by great swathes of shadow.
He carries her into the forest and buries her beneath one of the great trees at its heart.
Ksena is the first woman he ever loved who has been taken from him by violence rather than time, and it is an experience he will not soon forget.
He does not paint her afterwards, too angry and too hurt.
Instead, he returns at once to Baghra.
She lets him weep and rage without saying anything negative about Ksena (that particular boon lasts exactly three years - then she's back to muttering under her breath).
But when time has eased the sting of watching her burn, when he has painted Elizaveta, it feels like it is time to remember the woman he lost so cruelly.
He doesn't give her a Materialki kefta - she would have hated it, he knows in his bones.
It's draped over the seat on the little fishing boat instead, the purple and red catching the light of the setting sun and reflecting in the clouds that halo her.
Surprisingly, the great sunset he painted her against does not remind him of the flames that engulfed her.
It fits her too well.
He paints her laughing, and places her where her laughter seems aimed at the Fabrikators' failed experiments.
****************
After watching them burn Ksena, he resolved to never be distracted from his great work again.
He may have many lifetimes to waste, but others do not.
He throws himself into trying to make a better world for Grisha, creating safe havens, spy networks, anything he can to try and stop the senseless murder of his kind.
It had been a joke with Ksena, a game really, evading the witch hunters, pulling clever little tricks on them.
It had been funny then.
It is not anymore, not when Ksena is dead because of it.
One of his first recruits in his efforts is a Ravkan Healer.
She is the daughter of a noble family who were torn between not wanting the taint of an abomination in their family and not wanting the taint of infanticide on it - she had taken the decision out of their hands and run before they could try anything.
Luda is an unexpected boon, pragmatic and sensible, and filled with a steady fire for his cause that even he cannot match - not after so many years, not after he has lost so much of his heart (of his humanity).
It is her idea that he go to the Tsar and try to secure royal aid for the Grisha.
He brings her with him of course - he has been raised in the wilds, not at court, and has no idea what to do with himself among the nobility.
It is thanks to her that he secures Anastas' favour, and thanks to her that he survives the poisoned knives of court long enough to do so.
He wins the Tsar's war for him, and the memory of Solveig and the spectre of Elizaveta and the echo of Ksena and pragmatic, clever Luda at his side all push him to claim his boon in a place where Grisha can be safe.
Anastas gives them a run down ruin of a mansion in the middle of the wilderness.
A hunting lodge, abandoned after the constant royal hunting parties thinned out the nearby animals enough that they no longer gave 'good sport'.
It is barely habitable, but it is a start.
It is something, after so long with nothing.
The few Grisha who have folllowed him since this crusade began settle there with a joy that has nothing to do with their surroundings but everything to do with the promise of something they have never had.
With Luda's aid, he becomes one of the tsar's most favoured generals, winning bloodless battle after bloodless battle for him.
She teaches him to be gentile, urbane, sophisticated, everything he needs to be taken seriously at the glittering court.
Everything is going so smoothly.
Anastas smiles on him, names him his Black Minister, his foremost general.
The courtiers hide their sneers behind powdered hands and smiling faces.
Grisha have a safe haven, a place they can live and let live without fear for their lives.
There are even whispers of those who worship the Starless Saint - the dark angel who has saved so many Ravkan men on the battlefield.
Then overnight, everything changes.
He is driven from the tsar's court, a bounty set on his head, on the head of the Black Heretic.
Luda is murdered in front of him.
She dies because he cannot heal her.
For all his power, he can only cut down those who butchered her, and hold her as she dies.
Clever, pragmatic Luda with her healing hands and her razor sharp wit.
Gone.
And then...the Fold.
He runs.
Hides.
Weeps.
Maybe he goes mad.
In the end he paints her.
There is nothing else to do.
She is an angel, her hands folded demurely, every feature softened and perfected, surrounded by a golden halo as if she is a saint.
It is not her.
It is some grotesque expression of his grief that is such a butchery of her memory that the Darkling feels as if he has killed her a second time.
He burns it, tries to forget for a while, but then gives in and paints her again - this time the true Luda, not some hagiographical mockery.
Her hands are arrested mid motion, in the middle of healing an unseen patient.
There is blood splashed on her skirts, and her dark hair is ruffled.
She hangs in the Healers Wing as well, in the end, though not beside Elizaveta.
Elizaveta watches over the young Healers learning their craft with a serenity they can only envy and an assurance that reaches them through the long stretch of time.
Luda works above the busiest ward in the wing, alongside the Healers of this new time, her capable hands never still.
****************
He goes travelling after Luda, after the Fold, trying to run from all the awful things that have gone wrong.
Eventually he finds his way to newly discovered Novyi Zem - as far away from Ravka and his memories as he can possibly get.
His next wife is a Zemeni girl, a Tidemaker named Jela.
She is sweet and soft and gentle, everything that determined, gritty, pragmatic Luda was not.
He finds comfort in her at first, and slowly grows to care for her.
Equally slowly, he begins to think of her place at his side as hers - not as Solveig's or Elizaveta's or Ksena's or Luda's.
Baghra disapproves, of course. "The other was better, boy," she says, sneering at the sweet, soft girl on his arm, "this one is too soft."
She drives Jela to tears within five minutes, and Aleksander can only sigh, and comfort the weeping girl with kisses and soft words.
He loves her, and she drives out the grief and memories and aching loneliness, but he does not quite understand her.
She is too sweet, too soft and kind and sheltered to be comprehensible to a someone as ancient and broken as he.
But he loves her, nonetheless, and what little is left of his heart is hers.
He stays quietly with her in a little house beside a still lake, letting her heal the shattered grief in his soul.
She dies before a century has passed, and he buries her on the lakeshore, leaving the house and the fields to fall into disrepair.
He paints her, before he leaves, the soft cloud of dark hair, the sweet smile, the gentle hands and doe-like eyes.
Then he returns to Ravka, and Baghra, who only sniffs and mutters about too-soft girls when she can plausibly say she didn't think he'd hear her.
He doesn't think of her often, his quiet, gentle wife, but he does paint her once more.
After the Little Palace is built, when he has hung Luda above her fellow Healers.
It is only natural to continue from the grief of remembering Luda's death and the agony that followed to the comfort of sweet Jela, so he paints her too.
Gives her a blue kefta with tidemaker blue patterns, and sets her beside a calm, blue lake.
Lets her dark curls fluff in a halo about her sweet face.
Fills her hands with cool, clear water and her eyes with that gentle serenity he had found so soothing to his wounded soul.
He hangs her in the pavilion by the water in the Little Palace.
There, at least, she is free from his ghosts as she never was in life.
What they had was unfair to her, who was so unspoilt and pure, but she stayed and she loved him, regardless of how poisonous his ancient, broken love was to her.
This is the least he can do for her - to set her loose, unchained even to the memory of him, known only as another Tidemaker.
What does it say of him that the greatest gift he can bestow is the anonymity of forgetfulness?
**************
The Darkling returns to Ravka as his own son, appropriately penitent for his sire's deeds.
He has been betrayed by one Lantsov king, and hunted like an animal by generations more, but somehow it works.
The Little Palace is just a hunting lodge on the outskirts of the palace grounds, verging on the forest proper.
Yet it is theirs.
And then, impossibly, it grows.
First one Grisha joins them, then another and another, and suddenly a flood, a full battalion of them altogether within walking distance of the king.
Many eager hands tear down the lodge and in it's place grows a fairytale palace, simpler by far than the gaudy Lantsov thing and a hundred times more lovely.
Just like that, the Second Army is established.
After years beyond counting, Solveig's dream has finally come to fruition.
Grisha live in a palace, with fine food and clothes, and they are safe.
He has made it so - and it is a heady realisation.
Less heady is the knowledge that they must have a hierarchy of sorts, for there are far too many Grisha now to be individually led by one man alone.
They all have needs, every one of them - food and education and training and living quarters and all the hundred other things he is obligated to provide.
The Darkling doesn't enjoy such tedious administration, but thank all Saints for his second.
Ekaterina is another who ran before her parents could decide between the evils of a witch daughter and kinslaying, though she is no noble's daughter as Luda was.
Her parents were merchants, and she was brought up dealing with numbers and logistics.
They begin with meetings over grain transportation, infrastructure and other tedious things he doesn't care to remember, but before he realises it they are waking up together every morning.
At first, because they fell asleep over the war table she insisted they get, and then more and more often they wake up together, in his bed.
One day she never leaves, and her keftas appear beside his in the wardrobe.
They get married at some point, he thinks - it is the thing to do, but he is never entirely sure if they have been properly married or if she merely ignored the formality.
She is an Inferni, efficient, harsh and confident, and impossibly bright.
Occasionally he wonders if such a bright woman can be truly an Inferni, or if she is something else - something more.
Ekaterina is the first time he wonders about an opposite to Shadow, about an equal rather than a fleeting sweet memory.
It is, of course, only idle thought.
Ekaterina is nothing more than a brilliant Inferni, but oh how brilliant.
Baghra, now firmly ensconced in a little hut on the edges of the grounds, disapproves.
She had become complacent after sweet, meek Jela, and is disgruntled at a new daughter-in-law that will not let Baghra bully her.
It escalates and escalates until it becomes nasty - not quite to the point that Baghra uses the Cut, but certainly worse than any of his precious loves.
In the end, Ekaterina keeps away from the little hut and Baghra doesn't leave it.
If the Darkling wishes to see Baghra he must visit her.
They introduce fireworks to Ravka around this time, and the first time he sees one he can only think of Ekaterina - loud and brief and in that one short-lived moment so impossibly bright and wonderous.
Jela brought healing and peace to his wounded spirit, but Ekaterina brings back joy.
She dies of course.
They all do, in the end.
It is quick at least - a lucky strike to the head in the heat of battle, the Healers say she didn't feel a thing.
She was barely forty.
He buries her in the main gardens because once in the dead of night she had confessed that she was afraid of being forgotten, of blazing so briefly that no one saw her at all.
People pass by her grave every day.
He does paint her, of course.
She stands at the war table, the familiar little crease between her brows as she thinks over a problem, the racing thoughts darkening her vivid eyes.
The long tail of tangled red-gold curls cascades over one shoulder, trailing shining strands over the hand she reaches out to the raised map, holding an eagle painted not Ravkan blue but the Etherealki blue of her kefta.
It hangs in the dining hall, so she can see the result of her meticulous planning.
The flame, the idea had been Solveig's, but had been Ekaterina who had made it reality.
***************
The nature of the Little Palace is such that, after a time, he finds taking a Grisha lover difficult.
It is incredibly awkward to proposition, or accept propositions from, someone whom you had watched toddling about as little more than a babe.
The Darkling has never felt his age as much as when he realised that he had watched almost every Grisha in the Little Palace grow up - from the eldest elder down.
He has always known, intellectually, that he is much older than any lover he should take, of course.
It is an obvious consequence of immortality.
But the fact remains that never before has he been in one town or city long enough to watch babies grow into women with desires and designs.
It is a sad fact when he has lived the better part of a millennium, but it is true.
And he simply cannot bring himself to take a lover from the ranks of his Grisha.
Every time he looks at the majority of them he remembers an embarrassing childhood anecdote - the majority of them he knew before they could speak or control their own bodily functions.
It feels wrong to be intimate with someone when his dominating memory of them is an adorable child with soot on their face.
There are, of course, those Grisha who were raised outside of the Little Palace.
Most of these are rescued indentures from Kerch - few Grisha survive in Fjerda or Shu Han long enough to escape as adults, and those who escape the Wandering Isle tend to head for closer Novyi Zem.
But many of these Grisha are scarred by the lives they have led, and it would be an abuse of his power to take one as a lover when so many of them are used to being owned and used.
He resigns himself to being celibate or indulging in brief dalliances with otkasat'sya women, though few are brave enough to speak to him let alone sleep with him.
Ilsa, however, is different.
She is a Kerch indenture, but unlike most of those rescued, she is no shell reacting to little but direct orders.
Ilsa is quiet, yes, and clearly has not escaped her indenture unscathed, but there is something indefinably hard about her that few of her shadowy compatriots possess.
She's a Durast, and a good one too, firm and sure in everything she does.
Outwardly she appears wispy and delicate, but one look in her eyes shows him a spirit that could outlast the very mountains without wavering.
He doesn't immediately consider propositioning her at first.
All he can think of is the mingled relief and rage that always accompanies such rescues - relief that it was successful, rage that it was necessary.
Then, of course, he has to help her and her fellows to settle in.
Reassure them that they have a new home, that they are now their own masters.
Assign Grisha to befriend them and comfort them.
Check in on them every now and again.
He visits Ilsa quite a lot - her work is so fascinating, he cannot keep away.
She has a whole workbench to herself within a month, every inch covered in designs and metal and fabric and glass.
His second, an annoyingly perceptive Squaller by the name of Irina who is no longer bothered by his embarrassing recollections of her childhood, points out to him after a year that he visits Ilsa every other day he is in the Little Palace.
He doesn't even visit his horse every other day - every week if he's lucky.
When he protests that he worries about the ex-indentures, she raises one sardonic eyebrow and reminds him that the last time he assessed the Grisha rescued alongside her was half a year ago.
They are perfectly at home in the Little Palace.
In the end, he does have to admit that perhaps he is paying a little more attention to Ilsa than to most Grisha.
It does unsettle him that he hadn't noticed - has he truly been living in the lap of luxury so long that his instincts have dulled?
His mother is, of course, no help.
She scoffs and warns him not to get involved with one of the indentures, that Grisha these days are fragile and spoiled and break at the slightest hint of pressure.
When he presses, she admits she has only the faintest idea who Ilsa is.
But then, when has Baghra been helpful in matters of the heart?
What little heart is left to him, anyway, the tiny fragments not buried with long dead women, forgotten by everyone and everything save him.
In the end, they talk.
They marry, quietly, officiated by the Second Army chaplain.
She made rings for them to exchange, simple bands of gold set with jet and amethyst.
It is a new custom, but not one that he dislikes.
It is nice, to have something permanent to show that they belong to each other - for this lifetime at least.
Almost, the Darkling wishes that this fashion for rings had been invented earlier.
He would not mind having one small, simple piece like a ring that had no meaning save as a memory of something that he alone now holds.
If his fingers had glittered with tangible reminders of the pieces of his heart buried in cold earth, of the vows long broken by death, perhaps it would have hurt that little bit less.
They are happy, for a time.
Both of them have scars and wounded souls, and Ilsa's quiet companionship is a balm to his.
He cares for her, greatly, perhaps he even loves her.
There is no fiery passion as there was with long dead Solveig.
Perhaps he is so old that he has lost any ability for such intense emotions.
But Ilsa is very dear to him.
He misses her greatly when she dies.
It was no surprise, but it was a blow that he had not expected to feel so deeply.
Almost it feels as if the world had tilted, and all the colour had been dimmed ever so slightly.
Ilsa is gone, and with her a stability he had not even known he had begun to rely so heavily on.
She had lived long by mortal standards, he supposes, well past a hundred.
Perhaps she could have lived longer with an amplifier, but they were rare, and what few there were went instantly to combat Grisha.
There were none left for a Fabrikator, even the wife of the General.
He paints her with her hands full of oddments, bits of metal, glass, fabric and wood, in the middle of being assembled into some arcane contraption.
Her kefta has the slightest hints of wear at the cuffs where she always tugged at them.
She had always had a particular smile when a project was coming together, but try as he might he cannot capture it.
She hangs over her favoured work bench, watching all of the marvels that are created on it day by day.
Perhaps the Darkling is biased, but he thinks that nothing her successors create can match the wonders she had put together at the drop of a hat.
He will let her be the judge of that, however.
**************
Alina sets his world ablaze.
He had become...tired, he supposes is the word.
Ilsa's death had hurt him more than he thought, deep where he keeps his love for the women stolen away from him by time.
He misses her.
And Ekaterina.
And Jela.
And Luda.
And Ksena.
And Elizaveta.
And Solveig.
And every friend he has ever lost to the inevitability of death.
Yes.
Tired is a way to describe it, he supposes.
There is a numbness to him now, an exhaustion beyond words.
The Darkling looks as young as he ever has, but behind the youthful face he feels the passage of time wearing him down.
Perhaps his body may not age, but his spirit is worn thin.
He had thought any sort of passion long out-grown, and buried with the scattered pieces of his heart.
Then she is brought into his tent.
Dirty, half-starved, almost wild, he cannot take his eyes off her.
She is...she is everything.
He doesn't even know her name and already he is certain that there will be no one for him after her.
There will be no way for him to love anyone but her.
He feels, well, he feels.
For the first time in so long, since Ilsa's death, or maybe even before that, everything is sharp and clear.
And centred around her.
His Sun Summoner.
His Saviour.
His Saint.
His everything.
He loves her.
He has loved her from the moment she set foot in the tent.
He loves her more and more with each passing moment.
He cannot help it.
Alina Starkov is his world.
Whatever she needs him to be, he will be - her prince, her lover, her villain, her confidante.
It is as earthshatteringly simple as his love for Solveig had been.
Baghra takes her away from him.
In all of their years together, she has railed against his loves, insulted them, endured them, threatened them, but never has she actively driven a lover away.
He is angry.
More angry than he has been in centuries.
As angry as he had been when he had lost Luda and created a nightmare.
And he is terrified beyond words.
Alina is not there, but she is alive.
For how long?
She is unprotected, alone and vulnerable in the world with no one but an otkazat'sya tracker.
The Darkling knows intimately, as few in this world do, just how cruel otkazat'sya can be to Grisha, or Grisha to Grisha.
How will she die?
Burned as a witch by Fjerda?
Cut up for experiments by Shu Han?
Drained for her blood on the Wandering Isle?
Enslaved and worked to death in Ketterdam?
Eaten by volcra?
His mind presents him with a new and terrible scenario with every moment that passes.
Never, in all his long, painful life, has the Darkling been so crippingly afraid.
He cannot lose Alina Starkov.
He could not endure it.
In the end, it is he who dies, and it is almost a relief.
He has watched the light die away in the eyes of too many lovers.
It would have destroyed him to watch the only one with whom he had truly had a hope of eternity wither away and die.
He will never need a portrait for Alina Starkov, will never desperately sketch and resketch because the details of her beloved face are blurring and disappearing.
She weeps for him, her tears like purifying rain on the desert of his soul, and he can go quietly into the dark night knowing that she will not leave his body to be defiled and desecrated as so many of his Grisha have suffered.
He does not have to watch her die.
It is a blessing he is unworthy of, but it is a blessing he will seize regardless.
It is a better death than he deserves, to die with his hand in that of his last love, his eyes drinking in the sight of her - young and strong and so achingly alive as he has not the strength to be in so long.
No, the Darkling has lived his life a thousand times over.
It is good that she lives, who still loves life and has hope.
Aleksander was finished long ago - it is only a mercy that his last, brutal end is watched over by the bright saint who became his everything.