Work Text:
Filia knows what it looks like.
She may have spent her girlhood sheltered by the temple and her adult life devoted to her monastic duties, but she is neither so blind nor so naive to be shocked by either the titillation or the dreamy dynamics of stories of passions and forbidden love. She even can admit, in the privacy of her mind, that she understands the appeal; her training as an oracle and priestess was physically gruelling and mentally stultifying. Narrative escape was a welcome one. Though she might prefer the stories of plucky orphans and collective affection, she isn’t immune to the draw of love stories.
She understands, in broad strokes, how a fictional hero's predatory hunger can be translated easily to the promise of care and protective dominance. Amelia had carried a small stack of slim romances in her pack with her, and Filia had flipped through several in curiosity. She had even found herself falling into the dreamy fantasy of a few of them.
Life among humans means a life among their stories, and as many of them are told, Filia truly admires the simplicity of fairytale romance. Differences of names and nature aside, they feature clever, dangerous, strong men, and wide-eyed, beautiful maidens, and passions that could save worlds. The secretly-sensitive rogues always pursue hungrily and protect violently, while the secretly-empowered maidens protest wittily and then blossom into impassioned lovers. By the last pages, their love has crystallised into something beautiful and whole and purified.
Something perfect, a perfect ending, happily ever after.
So, yes, Filia knows exactly what it looks like, and exactly what people think, especially when they realise just how frequently Xellos has taken to appearing in her small, unassuming cottage.
She almost wishes they were right.
She’s satisfied with her life, generally, much more satisfied than she ever was at the temple. She knows the names of the shopkeepers’ children and the local farmers, and she enjoys every small, stolen moment of calm. She enjoys the seasons, so different from the arid mountains of her childhood.
She first found herself in the village, exhausted and somewhat bedraggled after travelling rough with a hatchling and two reformed mercenaries (who, while generally useful when fending off brigands, were less adept at childcare) and thought, this will do. And it had. It was interesting, she thought, as she poured over deeds and property licensing, how many choices appeared once one was on one's own. Jillas and Gravos fell somewhere in between being her friends and being her responsibility, and they held so much insecurity and diffidence, following her decisions with equal parts gratitude and heroine-worship. She finds it generally sweet, occasionally annoying, and she can’t deny that she has grown to love them. One distinct advantage of their village is that neither the two beastmen nor her own not-quite-human form raise many eyebrows. Adventurers come and go, and while none of the chaos of near apocalypses comes near enough for worry, the stream of both brigands and questing knights trickling through the small community create a rogues’ gallery too diverse and strange for the villagers to be shocked by any of them.
She never hungered for adventure the way many others do. Sometimes even Jillas and Gravos look at her warily, as though her plain little life is restrictive, or that she will someday grow bored with playing house in a sleepy hamlet with just enough worldliness to accept the presence of magic, but rather too provincial to be overly concerned with it.
Lina would find it maudlin. Filia thinks it’s perfect.
She knows what it looks like.
She tells Xellos as much when he leans in close, nose to nose, asking her what the neighbours must think of her, a single woman keeping house with beasts and monsters. She fights back the temptation to lean forward and bite his nose. She wonders how he would react.
“I know what it looks like,” she replies instead, tipping her chin so that she can look down her nose. “I’m not so foolish as that.”
He is indulging in a strange new habit of playing with the stray flyaways of her hair, wrapping a lock around and around his finger. She is unsure if he means it as a way to aggravate her, or whether it has become some new bizarre fixation of his. She is unsure if she hates it. She is horrified that if she examines it too closely, she will find it charming.
“I don’t know many people more foolish than you,” he chirps, sing-song. “You should be more worried about having your heart broken.”
Filia narrows her eyes at him, suspicious. “Why would I be worried about that? I know this isn’t a fairytale. I haven’t forgotten what you are.”
It is a rare and treasured occurrence when she surprises him enough that he drops a game, a taunt, or jibe. Instead, he opens his mouth, closes it, and cocks his head at her consideringly.
“For a reckless, feckless little dragon,” he says, finally, “you’ve managed something that few people in millenia have.”
“I won’t give you the pleasure of asking,” she replies, trying, and failing to hide that she does, in fact, very much want to know.
“You’ve always known who I was.” He says at last, “Foolish and naive and generally useless as you are, you’ve still always seen what I am.”
Filia tries to shrug off the rising goosebumps and fluttered pulse. “You weren’t trying very hard to hide it.”
He laughs, delighted, in his peculiar and unsettling way, “It worked on everyone else.”
Eventually, due to Jillas’s absolute inability to keep his mouth closed, especially when praising her talents, some of the townsfolk tentatively ask her for occasional fortune telling.
She once would have been enraged that her golden gift, the touch of oracular light, her most divine and powerful talent would be used for such lowly purposes.
Now she just smiles and hums intently at scrawls of automatic writing, peering into palms and empty teacups repeating “No, you aren’t foolish to fall in love,” and “Yes, your children will be beautiful and strong,” and very occasionally, “You should consider reinforcing the rafters in the sheep barn.” She smiles without pity or protest at their ordinary wishes, their simple, sincere infatuations.
When the local millers’ son, a young man disfigured by an ugly scar running deep across his face and bright, sad eyes arrives one late afternoon, hat in hand, to ask for a glimpse of his future, she promises herself not to lie to him.
And when the mists clear from her mind and she sees the figures and symbols that have flowed out from her fingers onto the pages of parchment, she can’t help the tears as she clutches his hands and reveals to him that great things lie in store, and how much happiness, how much love and luck lie in wait for him, if he can hold on just a bit longer.
If there are fairytale endings out there, who is she to feel jealous of those who find them?
Xellos’s head is resting on her lap, the rest of him thrown across her bed haphazardly, as she bends over to appraise his face. It would be stunningly domestic, were it not for the drip of astral viscera, the stench of someone else’s stale blood, and the fact that one of his arms is laying momentarily forgotten on the floor. He doesn’t bleed precisely, but he’s damaged enough that there is a yawning gap through the top of his head down to his mouth, distended sides pulled apart at odd angles. She has already gently pulled the bisected halves of his head back together and placed the torn fragments of nose and cheek back into place, but they aren't yet secure. She’s taking her time, and he, silent and unbreathing, stays still and waiting. The oily darkness of his natural body is seeping out across her dress and onto her quilt, and she tsks at him, without malice, as she focuses on threading a silver sewing needle with a thin filament of glowing, holy magic.
She thinks that, if she were human, it would make her uncomfortable how inhuman he is when observed this closely, mere millimetres apart. His skin is too smooth and pale and cold, pore-less and hairless and almost brittle, and the dark lines of kohl around his eyes remain perfectly crisp and unsmudged. The sleek, foppish courtier’s hairstyle remains unruffled, not a single strand of unnaturally silky hair out of place. She realises, as she considers his countenance, how the much better the mask of manners and foppish demeanour must work on humans, who would not recognize the danger until it was already too late. They can’t feel him the same way she does, an electric itch under her skin, the heavy thunderstorm of magic around him that reeks of power.
However, he is so used to playing the part of humanity that some of it has become second nature, or perhaps he is more like humans than he would ever admit, because his small expressions, the twitches of his mouth, his startled laughs, are real, or at the very least, involuntary. Even the small wince of his face, laid out across the width of her thigh as she works to stitch his eyelid and nose back onto the rest of him, is real in some particular, peculiar way. But the actuality that he is in literal pieces around her, that once she finishes the tidy, clean threads of magic that will serve to hold the facade of him in place, he will stretch out and leer at her as he reconstructs himself from the inside, well. That would give most human- companions (“lovers” is the closest label she can find, and just the word makes her stomach clench), pause.
(It would give most dragons pause as well, but she has long since given up the pretence of being like most dragons.)
In the stories and fairytales, the heroes and heroines look, well... The heroines look quite a lot like Filia herself, and as ethereal and androgynous and annoying as Xellos is, if one were to cross their eyes and squint, he could certainly pass for one of the heroes. And just as the stories say, the heroes are worldly and rakish, and the heroines morally upright but naive.
Filia knows exactly what it looks like. She knows that they should fit each role perfectly.
In the stories, the hero and heroine come together, work together, fall together, and come together with the hero morally reformed and the heroine with a newly opened mind (and usually legs).
Filia hadn’t so much opened her mind as much as she had been spiritually decapitated, and it wasn't empowering or liberating or remotely libidinous. The reconciliation of realities had been wrenching and ragged. Scraping herself off the ground to see her entire life unmoored, distorted, from everything she had ever known? It hadn’t felt romantic in the least. As for Xellos, she snorts at the very idea that he could undergo any sort of moral reformation. He isn’t immoral as much as he is amoral, and that is both fundamentally different and much, much more fearsome and horrifying in practice.
If there are multiple truths, then there are no absolutes, she thinks. What are good and evil, really, if they are relational morals and realities based on different planes? Xellos might be evil incarnate by her own cosmology, but even among those who interact with him, his intentions are more labile and mercurial than pure evil can explain. How too, if she is truly pure and holy by nature, does she explain her inherent, raw violence, the urge to fight, to bite, to burn? Humans, in making the designations, have created a rubric where they can exist comfortably in the middle, neither holy nor demonic, but balanced in between dark and light. Filia wonders if the goodness and badness exemplified in their fairytales is simply missing another dimensional perspective, a third axis of constitutional humour. There is something decidedly inhuman that she and Xellos have in common, and she can’t describe it; a word or notion just beyond her grasp, a third quality, fixed in stasis between creation and destruction.
The stories are too simple and trite and tidy, and yet, Filia thinks, hadn’t her mind been broadened, her naivete punished and her piety eroded? Xellos had not had morality nor mind reformed, but from the first time she’d reached out to heal him, she had been reworking and reforming him, reorganising the swirling mist and astral lymph that made him.
They endlessly consume each other and it is like a fairy tale, she thinks, but one of the ones that are only told late at night. It is one of the fairy tales that ends in blood and bones, in deep, abandoned wells and dark, hungry forests.
She doesn’t lie, exactly, about who and what she is. But she also doesn’t correct the villagers’ idle gossip. Most have set their money on her being a cursed fairy princess or some unusual race of elf, driven from her home by nebulously villainous forces. The stories are fabulous, fantastic, but ultimately banal. As far as the village is concerned, her background is merely detritus of another time and place, what matters more immediately is that she is reliable with rent, generous with her tea and time, and an incalculable asset in games of pickup cricket against the neighbouring hamlets. She sells antiques and curiosities, buys meat in bulk quantities, and tries her hand at growing dahlias.
Some look her over, taking in the sight of her fatherless son, sleeping and swaddled against her chest, and speculate that she was exiled, disgraced, after a steamy, sordid, forbidden union.
She has to laugh when she hears that theory.
It doesn’t shame her; they aren’t really even wrong.
It does shame her that when she sees him, torn apart and dripping with something that is too black and toxic to be called blood, she feels, not panicked, but powerful. She sees him broken and cracks her knuckles and flexes her fingers. She knows that he doesn’t need her to heal him, he doesn’t need her at all. He comes to her to be healed because she loves to watch him hurt. And if her magic burns at him, if she tugs the torn pieces of him back together too roughly, needle and thread and bright light digging into false skin and astral tissue beneath it, she likes to be the one to stitch him up.
Healing can be more painful than violence, more than any intentional, injurious harm. He may be one of the most powerful creatures in existence, an amorphous beast wearing the skin of a man, but that doesn’t make him untouchable. If she tries very very hard, even she can hurt him, and there are universes of other beings who are much stronger than she is and who hate so him much more than she does.
She’ll never be able to hurt him like they do, and even when she does hurt him, it’s soured by the reality that he is letting her. It’s patronising, annoying, and takes all of the delight out of lashing out at him.
She knows that she is not the only one who wants to harm him, and knows that she has much less ability than many of his other enemies. She doesn’t even want to hurt him anymore, because she gets something better. She gets to put him back together. And no matter how terribly he is torn apart, how completely someone else tries to break him, she is allowed to run her fingertips over every crack and tear.
She learned, from both Xellos and Valgaav, how incredibly intimate violence can be. Violence, from them and with them, was terrible and passionate and transformative. But there is nothing, nothing more powerful and intimate than being the one allowed to gather up the pieces. The momentary flashes, fervent and raw, of violent rage are nothing compared to the slow, bubbling energy that builds when she resuscitates and reconstructs him. There is nothing but the two of them, tangled up together so closely that when her fingers are inside of him, they brush against the vibrating hum at the centre of his being. If he were human, she would call it a heartbeat. As it is, she can’t help but think of it as a purr.
Of all her talents, the one truly formidable and singular gift that had singled Filia out for adulation and adventure was her oracular aptitude. Because of this, she cannot fathom a world that does not have any interdependent organisation, perhaps not an immutable reality, but rather a flood of plausible probabilities, some more opaque than others. She believes in fate in the same way that she believes in the sunrise. And if one believes in fate, it is very, very hard to argue that she and Xellos are not fated to be intertwined in one way or another.
Of all the things that her brutal revelation had shocked into alteration, her understanding of fate was one pillar left unshaken. As much as she might have wished otherwise, she and Xellos had been fated for something from the moment that she received her first hazy visions of the apocalypse. There had always been a throbbing adumbration surrounding their interactions, and she can admit, with the full clarity of hindsight, that she had hoped and prayed that it would be combative rather than consumptive.
She never expected to find herself here, with her strong fingers pushing at the membranous shell that separates the flimsy suit of his physical body from what he truly is inside.
The first time she tried to heal him, kneeling beside him in panic and trying desperately to remember the complexities of complementary and oppositionary magical ley lines, if holy magic would be rejected by his body, and making the frantic decision to use it anyway, anything to try to repair the yawning tear through his body that was weeping oily, toxic bitumen onto the cavern floor. She’d been distraught and confused and frightened, and she had pulled the pieces of him together inexpertly and caked the gap in his side with layers and layers of sorcerous filaments, as though patching a hole with clay and praying that it would hold together. He’d been cauterised and packed back together so inelegantly that she winces now to think of what a poor job she had done. She knows him so intimately now, the layers and vesicles of him, the way he is framed and contoured, the currents of his interiority.
His body is no longer a secret to her.
At the time, however, she had been much too busy trying to still her mind, to stop thinking: why did he do that, why did he save me, why did my breath stop when he held me tight, he picked me up like I was nothing, what is he up to, what was that, what was that, what was that.
Despite how delicately she works, there’s no numbing magic, no gentleness. He chooses to drag himself to her broken and shattered, and she chooses to let him, to let him drape himself and his battered form all over her. She lets him, because she wants to. It is addictive to be the only one permitted to see him so torn apart, the only one who is so licenced to twist his limbs back into place, who gets to stitch the pieces of him back together. She works on healing him thoughtfully and slowly, and she knows it’s painful because she is very, very careful to make it painful, to let him feel every tiny twitch and tremor.
And he eats it up, eats her up, like some wild, starving animal. Each time she feels the fissure of pleasure run through her body as she twists and wrenches him back into a human shape, she can almost feel him licking every inch of guilty satisfaction off of her skin.
There are worse things, she supposes, than to be tied by destiny and desire to such a dark, inscrutable creature. After all, they could have just stood by and let the world end.
She thinks that the seed of this strange obsession, this fascination with his body, might have been planted when she clumsily tried to stuff his viscera back into his body on the floor of the cavern, but it hadn’t really started there.
She had had time to grow settled, to grow houseproud in her cottage and comfortably rooted in her small community. When he appeared in her parlour just as she was settling in with a teapot and some accounting, it wasn’t the first time he had appeared for the sole reason of aggravating her, but it was the first time he had come injured. As crisp and artfully precise as he remained, he had arrived with a deep gash dipping into the side of his face, open and ugly and wet.
It was obviously calculated; a wound like that wasn’t anything more than a touch for him, but he had chosen specifically to leave it, to flaunt it. She wasn’t sure exactly what emotions he was trying to provoke, only that she had quite a lot of them bubbling in her belly. She was angry at the manipulation, and even more angry that she couldn't help but give him precisely what he wanted.
A slow drip of heavy black essence pooled up along his cheek, trailing sluggishly along his jaw before falling with an acidic hiss to the floor. She could see it burning at the floorboards, provoking something hungry and possessive and confusing. He kept studying her, smiling mildly, enjoying the knots she was tying herself into. She was feeling proud of herself for not giving him a reaction, grinding her teeth together and pouring him a cup of tea, when she realised that smoke was streaming from her nose. When she looked up, and saw him shaking with silent laughter, the tight knot inside of her pulled taught, and she flung the hot tea at him, furious at the entire situation.
“What gives you the right-” she bellowed, only to be interrupted by a soft tut.
“Careful not to wake the baby,” he hummed at her in his horrible, sing-song voice. The rage and banked fire stuck in her throat, and she felt that rising excitement, the terrible mix of genuine fury and guilty titillation that he managed to pull out of her. She wanted to scratch out his eyes and eat them.
“You can’t just come in here,” she continued in a fierce whisper, “uninvited, not even cleaning yourself up, still leaking filth from whatever nightmare you’ve created now, and I ought to-”
She glanced around her parlour, helplessly riled, and her eyes fell on her sewing basket, the sharp scissors, the half-finished velvet waistcoat that she was constructing for Jillas.
“I wish I could just stitch you closed,” she hissed out. As soon as it fell from her mouth, the air seemed to shift sideways. The vitriolic banter faded and everything was inexplicably, uncomfortably warm, with brimstone and ozone mixing in the heavy air.
“Well,” Xellos said finally, and instead of dismissive and provoking, he sounded intrigued, “there's a thought.”
Filia knows that she is no intellectual; in fact, she readily admits that she had only paid close attention to the practicalities of her vocation. These had dramatically increased when she had, to the incredulity of her teachers and priests, demonstrated prophetic aptitude. No one, herself included, had expected her to become one of the strongest prophets of her generation, and that entailed much more study than she would have been drawn to on her own. As a result, what she retains from her decades of training is mostly information regarding prophecy, the education that would enable her to fulfil her destiny, and then, she had hoped, fade into a inconsequential role as a minor priestess.
On account of Xellos, however, she finds herself curious for the first time in centuries. The village library has all of three books and one scroll on the subject of comparative magic, and all of them written for and by humans, but they still hold infinitely more knowledge than she had before. She has always known that the astral and corporeal planes were different for humans, much less porous than for those beings who could exist physically in both. She is solidly concrete, a corporeal creature naturally existing in the corporeal world, but dipping into the astral dimension is not difficult or disagreeable. It is even necessary, in a world where humans are expected to be clothed, but dragons are not, and she maintains her own cross-dimensional closet where her robes and headdress remain stashed away.
The design and nature of the beings who push through from another plane, existing freely between corporeal and astral never occurs to her to ponder until she finds herself poised with silver needle and magical fibril hovering over the gouge in Xellos’s face, wondering exactly what she is about to do.
She breathes in, and holds her lungs full as she leans over him. He’s watching her face, unblinking, even though her fingers are pushing at the skin close to his eyes. He sits, studiously casual, as she bends over him, her knees pressed flush against his for balance. She is worried that she might topple over onto him, and she flexes her toes and tries to ignore the sudden light-headedness that is sweeping over her. Her needle stops, momentarily impeded by the shell of him, and then she feels his form open up under her fingers. She gasps, pushing into the membranous false skin, the skin resistant before breaking, pulling the needle into itself, and her fingers with it.
When the stars behind her eyes clear, she can feel him, a swirling mass of marrow held into loose form by the membranous film of cross-dimensional vitality and the furious swirl of a heavy nimbus of power. His flesh is in constant motion, churning like tides, but when she flexes her fingers, she can reach through the swirling cloud of dark matter around him and stroke the meat of him.
She realises, as her touch stutters across a cicatrix marring the smooth planes of his form, that immortal does not mean untouched. Without thinking, she digs her nails into it, scouring off the scar in a mist of spectral dust, and the strangled noise he makes burns through her in a wave of hungry euphoria.
Oh no, she thinks, and then, I’ll never recover from this. I don’t want to recover from this.
Filia limps barefoot across the kitchen, her boots, usually tidily tucked away, abandoned in a heap on the floor. She hisses as she pours water over her arm, the scraped and broken skin leaving trails of pink and red in puddles around the basin of the sink. She knows he’s behind her as surely as she knows that it was foolish to offer to catch and relocate the feral manticore who had been getting into the village garbage and generally causing a nuisance across the valley.
“What on earth did you do to yourself, you senseless snake,” he mocks, but there is a serious edge under the taunt. She sighs, rolling her shoulders back, too exhausted and vexed at herself to devise a witty rejoinder.
“Pest control,” she bites out, and twists her arm to see if the manticore left any spines embedded when it stung her. Sure enough, there are two, thick and ugly, digging deeply into the back of her arm. She twists, trying to grasp at them, when his cold, iron grip closes around her wrist.
“I don’t know what right you have to reprimand me when you show up here every other week with your entrails hanging out,” she snaps, and then, to her horror, she bursts into tears.
“This is different,” he says firmly, digging out the spines with a slim dagger that he produces from somewhere under his cloak, and then marches her back to the basin to debride the rest of the laceration.
“I don’t like this,” she ekes out, finally, as he is wrapping a roll of gauze around the washed and dressed wound.
“No,” he says, and he sounds pinched. “I don’t like it either.”
He’s started getting hurt on purpose, and although she can’t help but preen at the thought, the frequency of their rapidly increasing entanglements is due to engender equally bizarre complications.
She almost gets cocky, too lost in the grim satisfaction of watching her hands twist and bend him, too lost in the smears of something like blood that stain her fingertips inky black. Too delighted in the casual, consensual cruelty and the desire to draw it out as long as possible to be thoughtful or wary or to focus on anything that isn’t him.
She finds him, torn into paper-like shreds, floating gently around her bedroom, the majority of him settling onto her quilt and drenching it in the gelatinous mass of metallic-smelling black viscera. She watches it sink in, fanning out and into the fabric, and sighs heavily, torn between the strange beauty of his shredded body and the annoyance of stained sheets.
“Don’t ruin all of my bedding with your filth,” she says acidly, and turns back to the kitchen to brew a cup of tea.
He’s watching her slow, deliberate walk with narrowed eyes when she returns, his head hanging loosely off of his slashed neck, and she purposefully takes a large drink of tea before sitting down next to the pieces of him. She is pulling shreds of him roughly together, lining up the frayed edges of his body when she laughs out, without worry or fear, “You are like a horrible garbage puzzle.”
“Be careful,” he says, a little too loudly, his chuckle a touch too menacing, and she freezes.
She is suddenly aware that he is talking, not to her, but at her, and that can only mean that he is speaking for the benefit of others.
She leans forward, curling her body around his face, and doesn’t have to fake her trembling hands or the catch in her voice. She looks into his sly, clever eyes and thinks as hard as she can: I understand, I understand, what should I do.
“I’m just frightened,” she says, too loudly, loud enough that it bounces across the walls of the room. The seconds tick by and she pushes the stitches through him with shaking hands.
He tilts his head, now firmly sewn back onto his neck, closer to hers and stares at her hard enough that she sees stars. Play along, she understands, exhaling hard enough that his hair ruffles slightly.
“I’ll break your sweet, stupid, little dragon heart,” he says, his tone carefully patronising, but the words pass through her, out into the cottage and the night beyond.
She understands their private games, but without knowing the other players, she can only dig her fingers through his false skin, through that strange membrane dividing the physical and astral and then finally into the dark ether and let her fear and confusion bleed from her body into the core of his. When her eyes flutter closed, the tips of her fingers are deep enough in his body that she feels the two of them blurring together, the space where they touch burning like ice.
Once, as a wyrmling, Filia had upended a bottle of peppermint concentrate onto her hand, a common, worthless thing, not worth a scolding. She had quickly hidden her clumsy error, but beyond even the overwhelming scent, the primary memory is of her hand gone freezing cold and then as hot as magma, and then both at once. She had washed and scrubbed at her scales, but the tingling fire and ice remained for days.
Whenever she and Xellos touch like this, she is thrown back to the spilled mint, the burning tingle of her skin where they touch a harsh reminder that they really shouldn’t be touching at all. It burns, and she is horrified by the impulse to pour herself into him until she is completely consumed by the ice and flames.
When she opens her eyes, she can feel him moving around her, slippery and strong, and she understands what he’s trying to say.
She knows what it looks like, and it is far, far safer to let everyone else think that they understand.
A fairytale romance is expected, understood.
This sticky, wicked thing coiled between them is only safe as long as it can be slotted neatly into the story; the golden girl and the dark seducer, the enemies bound together, the forbidden love. Darkness and light should come together and shine, the stories say. They never say that they should twist and burn together in grotesque spirals of fascinated horror.
“You’re disgusting,” she whispers, not lying, and lets the amazement and awe drip from her burning hands.
No god would purify her, but that is such a small, human way to think. Her elders had spoken often of purity, of the contagion of dark magic and dark thoughts.
She has never been pure, that was another lie bundled in with all of the rest of their hypocrisy. She has never been pure, but neither has she been tainted.
In the endless, confused jumble of the sacred and profane, the orderly and chaotic, the binaries of dark and light only emerged when boundaries were drawn around them. So much that is and was can be coloured, not in shades of grey, but in prismatic spectrums of colour and light that defy definitional imperatives. Are the oppositional designations useful in any way except to differentiate one state of being, one sensory system, one fractal ontology from another?
Filia knows, with a certainty that defies reason, that despite what she has been taught, (despite what most of the worlds have been taught), that there are so many things that contravene discrete categorization. She still doesn’t know how all of it works, and assumes she never will. She only knows that she would rather be here, all tangled up, with slick, burning limbs buried deep inside a creature who is revoltingly, appallingly, beautifully grotesque. A creature who is just as repulsed and attracted to her as she is to him, who is as frustrated and fascinated as she is, a fated bond compounded by autonomous and endless appetite.
“You’re such an insufferable little beast,” he whispers, dark and affectionate into her ear, drawing a thumb across her cheek.
She turns her head to catch the finger between her teeth, and bites down, hard. He’s smiling broadly at her, and she smiles softly back, “Only for you.”
She dreams of them, together. She dreams of a beautiful maiden and a strong, dangerous warrior, but when they turn, she sees that their faces are bland and human. Small. So far below her. She looks down to see her own scaled claws and swings her tail experimentally, and then crouches, predatory. The lovers cower at the sight of her and Filia watches the dark, unnatural clouds gathering behind them, the electric fog bracketing them in. She sees, as the human lovers do not see, the cruel violet eyes that light the heavy storm, the gathering darkness.
She wakes to find an affectionate smile on her lips and a warm glow in her belly.
Filia knows what it looks like, and she concedes that maybe it is a fairytale after all.