The TwiceBorn

To Follow Your Voice Into Darkness

"I lost something precious; God'll save me from losing myself."--Indigo Girls

The dreams. They wove a spell of sweetness, drenched in the voices of the ancients and Alora stood among the Realms to watch the cavalcade.

It was a world of parallels. The addiction of night to day, and light to dark. She walked on sand the color of blood.

She had changed.

Each step forward had taken her back. She cast off the fragments of her doubt and offered herself up to Abigor's hands and he'd taken her raw talent and molded her into a half embrace of powerful darkness with a touch of light upon which to feed.

He'd pulled her inside of himself and she'd seen the gyre of his being. The breath of sins begun and their lazy flow through time. Abigor was an element unfettered, nothing but pure emotion that blazed desire into desperation, love into obsession, and yearnings into desolation.

And to Alora...he held his arms wide.

Her spirit went willingly. She knelt beneath his shadow and learned that she was no greater then her love of what had been lost. And no less than her most magnificent failure. She wept the tears of cleansing, a bitter salt that marked her heart and soul as Abigor sheltered her with wings that rippled and bled darkness.

Within his fold, she relearned her legacy.

It would define her. Her world began at the moment a soul cast off its shackles and emerged, stumbling and hesitant, into the Realm beyond. What virture had not been stolen in life, she would try and take at death. Wheedling and cajoling. Promising the impossible. She cast souls with a careless ease and reveled in the fire of which they burned.

Abigor was her equal. Her learning bound them and while he showed her what she needed to know she had ranged far beyond his control. He led her through the Realms like one blind until she got her bearings. And discovered her love.

She had stepped free from him, seeking and ingesting knowledge with an insatiable fierceness that caused him to waver yet his smile never lessened.

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"I can't remove it,you know." Abigor remarked as Alora studied the delicate scarring on her side. She hadn't taken much notice of it at first. She'd been so relieved to be rid of the rotten carcass she hadn't thought much about what had occurred beneath the bandage.

It reminded her of a fanciful spiderweb as it laced its way across her side and around to the small of her back. Like a tree as it scattered its roots.

"You can't?" She asked, as she allowed her fingers to trace the fragile etching.

"Why not?"

She was surprised but hardly disappointed. Her touch lingered on each dainty twist and turn. Abigor reached out and also traced the markings with one caressing finger.