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Their ink-stained hands are tracing dotting marks on your face and all you can do is falter.
All your defenses are gone once their chilled hands press against your cheeks. Oh, these hands—these skillful hands that are wrung with the tremors of bardic inspiration. You know this—sun-kissed warrior—that they can freeze you, but they burn. They burn and you don't know why. Your defenses crumble again. You stare. You're staring, soldier; why are you not at ease?
Their hands fall on your chest, and you want your head to fall on their lap. Their gaze—they never meet your gaze. They always lie somewhere else. The curve of your sides, the firm muscle of your arms. Everything riddled with freckles that rivaled the sky in the dead of night. Every feverish crevice one can find had brightly colored drawings all over the places they brush their lips onto. You keel, you always did hero.
You've always wondered if you can touch them the way you wish for them to touch you. How you leave your own marks like the ink blots upon your flesh. The charcoal decorating you, elevating you into their own art. You are ruined; you'll never leave this illusion unchanged.
Is this what you've always dreamed of?
They shift closer to you, angling their face to the side as they look anywhere but your eyes. A breath falls. Another. A shiver creeps down the arch of your back as they lean onto the juncture of your shoulder. Your nape is burning.
Despite the ice that is their own, they melt you. Purposefully undoing you with every knot unraveling before their very eyes. Like a tapestry woven with cathedrals of words in stained glass.
You were glowing, hero. Do you wish to wake up?
You've always been a strong one. Upholding your sword gleaming under the sun as you slay it upon foes. Raising that shield to defend others from offenders. Always quick to help and quick to protect. But how is it that you are so easily conquered by a threader of song and tale. Why is it so easy to make you bend the knee to a poet who hides?
This illusion is real. What you think is real. You blink. Deft fingers with lingering ink stains rub phantom lines and shapes onto star-dusted skin. This is real, more real than you think. You remember. You remember why you are here. Why are you drawn to this being with a silver tongue and unfocused eyes?
“Come back to me, pup. Have your thoughts gone too deep into the depths of Felicity?” Their hand squeezes your thigh. You keel again.
How ghastly. How pitiful. How can you defend now when you have loosened your grip? Bare wrist cuffed by slender fingers letting you dissipate all tense muscles. Like a docile pup with its tail between its legs.
Is this your duty? To be a lapdog to a monarch of poetry and poison? Like attor constricting your throat?
You know there is no malice but why are you out of breath?
Why are your thoughts plagued with every icy kiss they bring to your warm limbs?
You shudder. You yearn for more. You want more.
You want more , you greedily straddle their hips. You wish the Cradles can hear your plea, because gods do you want more. You want them all over you. You bask in this illusion—
Are you still dreaming?
Hero, why do you not answer? Why are you trembling, weak-hearted? Why do scarlet petals bloom on your cheeks? How they sprout like the chimerical fields in the spring of a void-like Felicity. How you sport it with a sheepish pride. Bleary-eyed and heavy-lidded.
You are stricken, pup. So stricken your mouth is agape as they steal another breath from you. Not from your lips but everywhere else. Chest, shoulder, and that burning nape again—as if taunting you. Their smile is engraved onto your skin, you wish they etched it with your colors. You wish the shape of their mouth is seared onto the hard edge of your stomach, the firmness of your shoulder, the burn of your neck, the softness of your thigh—
You hitch a breath. Are you still dreaming?
Endowed with much skill of the sword and poise of a sentinel, there is a vulnerable frailty in the way they strum you beneath their fingers like needlework. You have lifted before a white linen revealing a costume fitted onto a mannequin made in your likeness. Something akin to giddiness has overtaken you and you think, you reckon—
‘Have they written me on vellum? Marked me onto bark and stone tablets to let me display their story on the adorned stage? Watch their gaze in a sea of audience watching me play the part they've unmade and rebuilt for me?’
They grab your chin, bringing your face close to them. They thumb your jaw. A sharp breath. Another. You shiver.
“You heave, forlorn hero. Have you come back to me? Drawn your mind back to Eld?”
You've run out of words. Their song is still grating your bones. You think they can darn you back together with straw and thistle but you find yourself still coming unknitted. Every wrinkle sets another path to immortalize you yet you feel as if your heart is keeping a piece of them each time your back finds their chest. Every damning time your head is on their lap. And in due time, the fracture of your bones has their letters laced in each marrow.
Are you dreaming? Do you want them out of your head? Out of every corner your mind has? Have you not chosen this? Are you still dreaming?
You're in-between each edge of primality and a certain divinity. Like ambrosia reddening your lips. Like the cusp of immortality on a gold-laid platter. There is a rumble in your chest—a yearn to feast. Though what then happens to a being walking backwards into hell? In the wasteland of a strange man's god? What happens when invincibility turns back into a knowing humanity.
You're an epitome of a seasoned soldier, and yet why are you torn juggling between two sides? Are you not made of both of these things and none at all?
You are made to plough your own pathway, hero. And what now it is beyond glinted spectacles and saccharine grins. Of quills and hushed tales. Of a meadowlark twittering in your ear. Of a dog ready to heel in the hands of someone who had unknowingly conquered you.
You—arlice—so honorably you.
“Dismount, hero. Felicity has finished moonset and is in need of your golden strokes.”
You shudder. You whine. You find yourself grabbing the buckle of their suspenders and pulling them in. Your chapped lips find theirs. Their chilly palms fit perfectly on your hips. You don't know who pulls away but you do not care. You try to catch their lips for another but a small bout of laughter spills.
“Cooper .”
You blink. You do not know if you are dreaming.
“Is this real?”
The author—your very own corvid—the Playwright chuckles. They nuzzle your cheek and gently nudge you off.
“It is as real as you want it to be, hero.”
And this, this was unfair. But this, you think, is enough. Their eyes shimmer underneath their glasses. The corners of their lips soften.
“Now come. You are far too disrobed. I will dress you.”
You are not dreaming, you think.