Title: Dark Paraiso

Rating: T

Summary: the underworld is a lonely, desolate world. Perfect for one to reflect and be confronted by remnants of a forgotten past.

Pairing: Vayne/Milletian

Author’s Note: a very headcanon heavy ficlet. It doesn’t go anywhere particular but I’ve been repeatedly listening to fairytale by Alexander rybak for the past day. SPOILER HEAVY FOR C7

The sun sets on their fateful day, regaling the evening. Beimnech watches the incandescent glow from his tower, as his minions' frolic and the flames lick high and hot. A wondrous sight to behold.

There is twitching in the corner of his eye, a shimmer of grey and violet, and he turns his head, to spy a figure darting out of sight like quicksilver.

He sees it again, mooned on the tower, but each time he lifts his proud chin to glare, it flutters away, like a shy baby bird. Maybe he is tired. Maybe it is the reflection of their dark fire, rippled against the light of the moon. Even dark fae have bodies and minds that tire, especially after the potency of such a curse. His horns ache for the first time in centuries, like the worn knucklebones of labour farmers.

~ Cailleach is a spectre of lily pad green, age dribbled into her fair face, body pillowed and sexless. She had chosen to age like mortals, in a wish to partake in their pain. It had doddered her, made her slow, gullible.

Yet there were things in which she remained shrewd. She looks upon Beimnech with her eyes dark as summer honey, flecked with the aged autumn notes of her gathering years. Cailleach is universes older than him.

"Is there nothing I can say to convince you?" She pleads with a voice like softly falling sand. "Nothing I can say to remind you, even with our past?"

"The past is gone." Beimnech sits, the ponderous weight of his armor and a thrumming in his skull where the two horns are locked onto the bone. One of his earliest dark spells, a physical mauling of the body to tell all on which side he had chosen to dwell. The others had recoiled, as was his intention. Cailleach wept. She could configure everything once grandiose, marvellous, into the small simpering effects of missed opportunities, a callous call for kindness when the self should swell.

Kethlenda is not human, nor will she ever be. She had dulled herself, deadened her senses and her once-prodigious magic, out of a jealousy spun as curiosity for the creatures called milletians.

"It be the nature of curses," speaks Beimnech, a hand held to his heavy chest. He is certain he can see the girl, shadows in the corner of her eye, sunshine hair and nimble ankle, spinning. " I cannot remove or abide them, once they are cast. They run their course, or remain dormant, like the stars and sun. The most enduring of magics, they are."

Cailleach sighs.

'As always," she whispers. She cannot hate him, after all this time. "I wish you happiness, Beimnech."

~

The girl finally chooses to appear. Not in her courtyard, where her shadow has chased her monsters into the depths of the castle, but no. The irony is a fool's concept, but Beimnech laughs when he sees her, sitting tenderly at the end of her bed.

She wears not her royal gown, or devastated armor stitched by token magic, but the apron dress. She has been waiting patiently, slim fingers sweetly pleated into her lap. Well mannered. Kethlenda has certainly done her work.

She is not there in the flesh, for she wears a dream skin, incandescent under the light of the crescent moon.

"You put me here, didn't you?" Her voice sings pure and Beimnech feels a hackle up his back. Ugh.

"Thank you. Thank you so much."

"Thank you?" Beimnech cackles. "You poor fool. I trap you in a sleep that deems you ageless whilst the world withers around you, and you offer me thanks? Why I would say you were welcome if I knew you would appreciate the irony."

The girl creases her simple brow, tucks a sunshine curl behind her ear.

"I would have aged," she says, slowly. "I would have known a different life to the one I loved. Like this, I cannot leave the ravine or the palace. Like this, my dream will live on."

"Foolish." Beimnech feels, for a moment, weary. She has barely spoken two sentences and already he has a mild headache. Never mind the nonsense of the spectre sparkling in the reflection of the sun and sending her minions screaming into the moat. Half her forces have drowned themselves in protest. What would be grimly humorous is hurt by the peculiarity of the situation. "You do not know what awaits you, do you?"

"Not as of yet." She shakes her golden head. "But I shall find joy in what I do have."

Beimnech waits for her to leave. She doesn't. She sings and spins, her ice bright voice coiling the dead vines of the ravine at her feet flush with flowers.

Beimnech ponders if her curse, much like the gifts he had bestowed, has attached to the her centre, blown her dormant powers high and wild. Kethlenda has captured half the courtyard, bewitched the black and dead thorns to sprout blossoms pink as a baby's lips, to rise green grasses and wildflowers severing through the mouldy brick.

Time has begun to go by. Universes are constantly reset as he plays out the previous events over and over. He is no longer stuck battling an unwinnable battle, but now stuck in a different hell.

Truly a triumph for him, but he feels an apathy, for what the universe has lost he has unwillingly gained.

His pondering is interrupted as Kethlenda shakes her head free. Small flowers nest in it, winding around the hairs, a true crown for anybody of the fomors. She is seated beside Beimnech on the balcony, coyly patting out her ragged skirt.

"It is always so dark where you are," she says with her siren sweetness. It is positively uncomfortable for Beimnech's kind. "Surely, some sun. Maybe a walk in nature. To taste, to see, to be."

"I can see, taste, take all I need," warns Beimnech. At times, the strike of his temper has awakened a needed space for strife, struggle. Now, as if she is nursing a lame bear with a bad temper, Kethlenda remains mellow, levelled. "I require nothing more than what I have."

"What about what I have?"

Beimnech turns his fiery eyes to her.

"What are you talking about?"

"Surely, if what has been done is your doing," she says, pitch-perfect Kethlenda . "Then I can take a little in return. I did not know the fomors that called my name, but I fear for their wellbeing. I just do not see why I should have been the breaking or making of them."

"Fomors make little sense." Beimnech curls his cold hands around his sword. "Especially when it comes to hereditary inheritances."

"Hm." Kethlenda swings her fine ankles in the breeze, dropping petals and pieces of nest. "Land and blood. Neither of which I require, now I think on it."

"I can see. You are preoccupied with baubles, the frivolities of things such as small animals and flowers. Land and blood would have been wasted." He contemplates, riding a finger on the molten handle of his sword. He tries a smile. "If you wish, I can craft you a land of your own making, a land you can shape freely to your girlish tastes. You would find it more pleasing then what is here, I assure you."

Kethlenda ponders, twining vines into a tiara. She places it on her head, and crowns herself.

"No thank you," she says, politely, as always. "I like it here, for it is here I am needed. Nothing grows. The air is cold. I think a little breeze and greenery would do it good, don't you agree?"

"This is no place for anything like that!" hisses Beimnech, his calm guise stripped away as easy as he slid it on. She doesn't blink, just hums and swings her legs like a child. The vegetation from her budding magic has formed a field below her feet, the long trailing stems from her wooded plants drinking from the moat and clamouring high onto the turrets. Beimnech has struck and singed and cut them down. They rise in the same hour, stronger than before. "Damn you! This is not your domain!"

If the simple girl is capable of any offence, it is in the calling of her birthright. Her lilac eyes tremble and glow with rare furies, and the flowers quake, lightly, like the shiver of a storm long overdue.

"It is by you that I came into this domain," she utters, gentle. "And it is by your power that I remain asleep, for you would have preferred that over my death. You do not have that, so my life, even my dreaming life, is mine, and I shall lie the roots of all that I deem to be mine."

Beimnech hisses and casts his cape aside, disappearing. He expects her to be gone, but she has followed. She makes no sound as she moves, be it by dreamskin or that strange, gliding quality that animates her body like a dandelion cast on the wind. She ghosts her fingers along his arm, which causes a shudder as if she has mauled him.

"Maybe we could share," she offers. "You are lonely. I know you are lonely. That must be awful for you."

Beimnech does not answer. True to her expectations, Kethlenda finally surrenders and dissolves into the drizzle of sunlight through the crumbling balcony.

"It's a strange kind of curse," She whispers to herself. He has not failed her, having witnessed her successes and now, this tiny failure. She twists her neck up, sullen. Dewdrops clasp to his back where she laid her hands, leaving the chilly pattern of her touch. "It could be magnificent, the cruelties of it. Why, even I could not have imagined it such."

~

Kethlenda ages not in body, but in mind. Her clear eyes are daunted not by the promisings of love once dreamed, but with the callow of age. She has become lovely, a marbled statue where the weathering has corroded the mind, but not the body.

She is a charmed woman, body moulded by magic beyond personal choice or design. Beauty that would be cursed under any circumstance minus the privilege of her birth, a voice the sirens would chase to their deaths, grace and composure borne of her birthright.

Kethlenda has fallen in with the rain. Her elfin eyes, pointed nose, her tiny mouth that managed to contain her teeth - all the things that had captivated him, all those years ago in the faraway world where they were birthed - are no longer rumpled by the hoarsening skin of the enchanted aged. She appears mature because she has chosen to be so. She is older now because she is.

"Poor Kethlenda , the halfling ," scowls Beimnech from her bed. "Come to beg for the girl again, the girl you cannot have for our kind does not have the flesh needed for such a task?"

"No, Beimnech." Kethlenda 's translucent wings flutter weakly. The mossy rim that heralds her magic has grown, a surrounding silhouette on her person that beats colour and the vague taste of buttercream and rose. "I am here because we are moving on. There is no more we can do, in this world, and the fairies and fomors have decided that the world is turning from us. It is changing, faster than you know."

"I know all I need."

"Do you?" says Kethlenda , her quavering voice hitched with a shadow of an old hope, before she sighs. "I wish it could be so, but, you have not ventured from our home for many ages, now, and no-one can speak of the sleeping heroine, for your song and story has travelled out of time and tongue."

"You are leaving?"

"Yes, I am leaving."

"You plan to abandon me?" Beimnech's voice rises like a cymbal crash, but Kethlenda 's mauve pebbled eyes are full of pity. "Hear now. You speak of love and promises, and now you flee?"

Kethlenda does not reply, at least at first. She skitters over to the window, where the flowers have begun to scale the structure, kissing the bottom window sills.

"I believe we can all agree," she answers deftly. "That what is here is not exactly The Who you sent to sleep, all those years ago."

"You believe her wicked?"

"It's not in her nature." The room shivers, vines crawling across the flagstones and strangling her bedposts. The first show of Kethlenda 's rare temper. "I would know. I raised her. I loved her."

"No," Beimnech cranes his grey fingers around his chest. The flesh there beats with the memory of a heart long taken. "You cursed her when you bestowed upon a mortal child our gifts, which do not serve as well as we like, bound we are to our natures, and you served it to human folly. What did you believe she would become?"

Kethlenda says nothing, her rail body tucked up high up on her bed, just observes the gardens below, and finally, Beimnech.

"Goodbye, Beimnech."

"That is all I have?" Beimnech extends a clawed hand to take Kethlenda 's hand, freezing, in his own. Kethlenda mutedly gasps - a shade of her own past fear - but does not move away. "After all that has passed, this is all you leave me?"

"I never left you." Kethlenda places a quivering palm over the lock of Beimnech's fingers. "You left us."

Beimnech scoffs, crackling his skin and body with spider legs of black lightning, but it's a sigh in place of a scream, and Kethlenda tilts up her head and kisses the reddish scarred skin of his face.

It disarms him. Settles the fury, weak, in his bones, and when he nudges up her to chase the mouth there, there is nothing, save the fading twinkle of Kethlenda 's magic and the vines, founded by anger, now weeping bluebells.

~

Elodie, in her funereal lilac, sits astride the first step of her tree at the ravine

"You came back," she says, voice soft like a running glade. The rats patrol among her feet, directed by the song in her words. She sings even as she speaks. "After everything, you are here."

"What other place can I possibly haunt?" Beimnech strokes the frail rotten wood of the tree . It has turned to dust, the imprint of claw and marrow all that is left of his beloved. "This is my home."

Elodie stands, smiles.

"I thought we could share."

"That has to be a mutual arrangement."

"Has it?"

Beimnech stares at her with a glare steady as the stone around it, and Elodie extends her pale wrist like a vine and presses a corporal finger to the place where Kethlenda laid her final caress, and his horns crumble away, to reveal the blotted and bruised skin beneath.

"Damn you," Beimnech breathes, as the girl rests her cold cheek against his own, the posy lips stealing the shadow of Kethlenda ’s kiss. "Damn you."

The vines at Elodie’s feet creep up, up, covering them both, until they are bound, rooted.

Beimnech closes his eyes, dreams.

~

Fin