Dusk in Kalevia: Chapter 10

Night was falling in the desert, and the stars were coming out. Demyan tried to read them, but they were unfamiliar and had nothing to say, offering no hint of his location. They danced above, shifting position whenever he took his eyes off them, falling in a rain of meteors and blooming anew in celestial fields. The black outline of a mountain loomed on the horizon, a magnificent moon roosting at its peak.

He knew where he needed to go. It called to him.

He didn’t know if he walked for minutes, or hours, or days; the journey felt endless and the mountain came no closer. As he trudged naked across the plain, he tried to remember if he had been to this country before. There was none of the sagebrush fragrance of the American Southwest, no mountainous Gobi dunes–just a plain of white salt extending almost as far as his eyes could see and the chill of the night on his bare arms.

Thirst tore at him mercilessly, erasing any other thoughts from his mind. His tongue felt swollen and a fire burned in his parched throat, but he refused to avert his eyes from the pale beacon of the moon. He dragged himself forward, until at last he fell, despairing, to his knees.

As Demyan looked skyward, the moon seemed to detach itself from the indigo twilight and began to descend. As it fell, it changed, lengthening into a glowing figure, the suggestion of a human form cut from its cool light. Long white hair tumbled over its slender shoulders, scattering a trail of sparks into the night.

The androgynous being reached out and touched his cheek. Demyan leaned into the warm caress as it ran over his face and across his mouth, and then marveled as water flowed, glinting, into the cupped palm. Demyan pressed his lips to the luminous hand and drank deeply. It was pure and sweet like nothing he had ever tasted; he felt his strength rushing back to him. Droplets spilled and flooded the plain, turning the ground into an enormous mirror reflecting the inconstant stars.

As Demyan stood, the water lapping at his shins, he realized that the blue light behind the mountain was growing brighter with each passing moment. He had been mistaken–it was not night, but the twilight before dawn. With a cry he leapt and caught Zophiel up in his arms, and together they fell with a splash down into the stars, his black crow wings a shadow cast by rays of light.

 

Demyan woke in the night to feel the curve of a warm back pressing against him. His body still born aloft by the waves of the dream, he simply watched the white sheet rise and fall with Toivo’s breathing, possessed by a strange sense of contentment. He slid an arm over the man and drew him against his chest, the substantiality of Toivo’s form betrayed by the soft undercurrent of power that radiated from him even as he slept.

As the mutter of the heating pipes and a diffuse cast from the forgotten lights in the other room lulled him back to sleep, he settled into a blissful satisfaction he’d craved for eons. He thought of his hunger for the light, and muffled his laugh in mussed blonde hair.

I should’ve tried this lifetimes ago.

To be continued in Chapter 11.

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