Page 201 of To Free a Soul
She was half right.
When he turned incorporeal, his body – all of it visible – swirled like thick, matte-black smoke. What she hadn’t expected was his eyes to shine entirely gold, or for golden streaks of mist and dust to rotate within the swirls of his cloud.
He stepped closer, despite the fact that he floated off the ground by a few centimetres, and stood over her rather magnificently.Sigh. Even his Phantom form is too handsome.
And if it was the same as when she touched any of the Duskwalkers’ brides when they were in Phantom form, then she should be able to touch him. She doubted they’d be able to feel each other, though.
But she wouldn’t be able to escape him now if she used it as a way to flee him and his touch.
“Now that you have seen it,” he said, his lips pulling into a grin, “can we resume what you tried to run away from?”
Immediately knowing exactly what he meant, she couldn’t help her eyes widening. But she had two reasons for asking if he had a Phantom form, and it was so she could be prepared for a little fun.
He turned physical, and she shifted to intangible. His smirk fell, and his eyes narrowed darkly on her as she backed up with a smile. When he shifted forms, she did the same, ensuring theywere on opposite sides of life and death so neither could touch the other.
“Lindiwe,” he warned.
“Weldir,” she sang in answer.
His deep chuckle was a little more threatening than she expected it to be. “You do realise this will have consequences for you if I catch you.”
For the first time in her long life, she laughed so hard she felt it in the pit of her soul. “I guess I’d better not let you catch me.”
Weldir’s expression gave new meaning to the description of one’s gaze darkening. “Vexing female.”
I have much to show you, and there is more to the world than this.There was a way to frolic in it, live it, play in it. Lindiwe hadn’t done so in over three hundred years, and she’d like to do it with the being she’d waited so long for.I want to show him how to live.
She laughed, turned physical straight away, and waited for him to do so as well. She didn’t really want to play a game of tag, or hide-and-seek, or whatever it was that two beings who could transcend life and death with their very bodies might do.
Instead, she held her palm out. “Can I hold your hand?”
He halted and stared down at it with a puzzled frown, his lips tightening.
When he pushed his hand into hers, his claws gingerly tickling across her flesh, warmth radiated between them. It swelled in her chest, especially when he regarded her oddly with one side of his lips quirked up, while they walked together through the forest and the world he’d never touched before.
Hand in hand, together, alive and real.
A time unknown, but of silent oaths
Seated on the forest floor, Weldir had his side to the hot flames that reflected across his glossy flesh like rippling water. He saw it over the backs of his hands, while one of his offspring dangled from his claw tips with an adorable trill. The other, this one bearing a skull that looked rather similar to his own, slipped sideways on top of his head, rolled over his horn, and grabbed it to hold on.
The world was bright, the day early, and it was apparently spring. The middle of September or something – not that he truly cared, no matter how many times Lindiwe noted the date at the top of her journals or told him.
Time was still not a construct that interested him, not when he’d live forever. Days passed, all of them a blur, except for her. Never her.
Crouched behind him, Lindiwe stirred a pot over a small morning campfire. She’d gone to a nearby village, the name he didn’t care to learn, and obtained a handful of ingredients. She was cooking for him, wanting him to experience all kinds oftastes and textures.
He didn’t have the heart to tell her that food interrupted Tenebris, and he had to teleport it from him before it could enter his realm of souls. Her smile, overjoyed and soft, was just too lovely to dampen by refusing her offerings.
He peered at her silently, content that she was even there and wanted to stay by his side. Then he tipped his head so he could retrieve his falling offspring from his horn, as the sound of them thwacking against the ground was upsetting – even if they were never hurt.
He sat with them often, letting them crawl all over him as much as they wanted. He enjoyed feeling their warmth, their little paws stepping on his skin, and the way they nuzzled into him for more of his scent.
They lived underneath his robe of cloud dust, and he ferried them through the world as he explored it.
“They really like you,” she said in an uplifted tone, her dark eyelashes fluttering.
“It is probably instinctual,” he responded plainly. “I like them as well.”
