A Ballad of Snakes and Shadows // A Dark Sebastian Sallow Romance

Chapter Fifty Four: Run // stalker

TW: Panic attack, violence, mentions of revenge fucking. Unaliving thoughts. Drug use. Mentions of death.

Three Years Ago -

The waves that crashed around them were peaceful. They were almost enough to wash away all of the worry in his chest, and cast it all out to see.

However it was the deafening silence from Hattie that kept him from letting go of it.

She was silent, and that did not bode well. Not just for Sebastian himself, but for her.

Hattie had this horrible habit of getting so lost inside of her own mind that she would just leave him. And now she'd chosen to leave him alone on the beach while her mind most likely dove beneath the depths of those waves, until she was buried at the bottom of the ocean.

Sebastian knew he would have to go for a swim to find her again, and it would be quite a long dive before she came back to him. He knew what kept her anchored to the ocean's floor and for all his strength, it was nearly impossible to pull her back up.

The iron of the anchor was made of the heaviest kind of worry.

He had watched her resolve chip, little by little, as days went by in the oncoming war that laid ahead for them. The Loyalists had been increasing their numbers in the Highlands and Ranrock had not shown any mercy nor kindness in the fight. He'd given her no reprieve.

And he had taken a friend from her, in that fray - Lodgock.

Sebastian did not understand her sympathies for the goblins and their ilk, given what they had done to Anne. It had made him angry, had made the two of them fight with each other because of his own prejudices.

But he had seen how it had hurt her in the wake of that goblin's death - and for all of his hatred towards their kind, he put it aside. For her, he would let it go, and hold her until she'd stopped crying.

For Hyacinth Hills, he would do anything. Just to see her smile.

So he sighed, and felt her adjust a little beneath his head as she idly combed her fingers through his hair.

"Knut for your thoughts?" He murmured softly, as if only to slowly coax her out of her mind. She didn't stop running her fingers through his hair, a gesture that warmed his heart with something that he knew was more than just simple affection.

Sebastian had only just begun to feel the effects of that intense feeling that bloomed low in his belly when she was around.

It was love that he felt for her.

The kind that had integrated itself in him, without even realizing it. She had been all thorns and vines, wrapping herself around his heart until she had become something so much more to him than just a friend.

"Do you think there's a spell that could make time stop for as long as we wished?" Her voice was a whisper against the crashing waves. She'd turned her head back out to the sea, still stuck at the bottom of the water.

Her eyes had gone back to looking so damn vacant, he thought. And now it wasn't just her that was full of worry.

Everytime he thought he'd reeled in a meter of the chain of that anchor, it slipped right out of his hands. Especially when Hattie did everything she could to lean away from him, like she was afraid to unload anymore of her burdens in front of him.

As if he would run, after every insane story she'd fed him. Ancient Magic, Keepers, Isadora and her dark magic, and all of her involvement with Ranrock and Rookwood.