Chapter Text
~
It’s the eve of her wedding, and Elizabeth can’t stop looking at a dead leaf.
It’s the first time she’s allowed herself to take it out of the book and look at it since the fire. Since she and William arrived to find Victor’s tower a blazing wreck, flames roaring from every window, glass littering the ground like stars shot down from the sky. Victor curled on the ground, insectile, around his ruined leg. He must have been screaming, but they couldn’t hear over the noise of the fire.
In all the weeks after that, Elizabeth wore black. Not her whole outfit—William would have noticed, would have suspected, even sweet naive William would have thought something amiss—but bits and pieces. A black scarf. Black gloves. A black handkerchief tucked in her skirt.
Only now, on her wedding day, is she dressed entirely in white.
But no; that’s not true, is it. She catches sight of herself in the mirror. The rosary encircling her neck, bloodred droplets like a chain of death. And the ribbons wrapped over and over around her arms—they’re exactly like bandages, aren’t they?
Just like the bandages the man under the tower wore.
Yes, she carries these reminders with her. Even after the snow came and covered the land, blankets of muffling white, like it’s trying to erase her memories. Still she remembers.
She traces the veins on the leaf, remembering how similar his scars felt under her fingertips.
Talos’s scars.
She knows that to name the dead is foolish, pointless, but she can’t think about him without giving him a name. Victor refused to name him, of course—called him “it” with a sneer and a curl of his lip—but something about the man under the tower reminded Elizabeth of the ancient Greek myth of Talos. The massive, nearly indestructible giant of bronze, not conceived naturally but descended from ash-trees, who protected the city of Crete from invaders.
And speaking of invaders. Victor exited Elizabeth’s dressing room long minutes ago, but something sour lingers in the air. She feels now—pure and hard like a crystal—the hatred she had only pretended to feel that day in the confession booth. How she had slyly teased him as he pretended so hard to be a priest, hearing him lose his composure as she wounded his ego, deliberately wounding it like pinning a still-living insect to a board—something she would never do to one of God’s innocent creatures, but men, she has found, are fair game.
A deafening roar shatters her thoughts. Then an immense crash.
She looks up, heart racing. It came from the bedchamber just above her. It sounded like an animal, a wolf, some kind of beast—
She stops the thought just before it comes.
She runs. Surely someone has been attacked—
(by what? what else, who else, could have made that noise? has a lion perhaps escaped the circus and snuck into the house? Don’t be stupid, Elizabeth, you know exactly who you want to find)
—and in need of her help, surely…
She races across the halls, spurred on by the sound of breaking glass and another inexplicable roar. Her heart in her throat, she reaches the bedchamber and throws the doors open.
It’s him.
Everything else in the room falls away.
Taller than any other man, his hair now grown long and tangled around his shoulders. Dressed in animal skins and rags. His scars, the sutures that held him together, standing out on his face like exposed veins. His skin a sallow patchwork, his mouth like another scar in his face, lips thin and black as death.
He is the most beautiful creature she has ever seen.
She goes to him as if drawn by an invisible cord, a thread like moth-silk in the air, and he is looking at her as though she is the one who is impossible.
As though she is the one who is an apparition, a dream.
“You,” she whispers, first touching the skins covering his chest and then reaching upward towards his face. “You…” Her voice is breaking; there is a pressure behind her eyes.
He tilts his head, looking down at her with that same gentle gaze she remembers from when he was chained in the tower. She strokes the line of his jaw, his cheek, and he observes her with wonder. “It’s you…”
She knows he is thinking It’s you right back at her.
And she realizes now—she heard words in the roaring. Listen, he screamed, just before that first crash. But she is not surprised. She saw intelligence in his eyes from the first moment they locked gazes in that dank underground place.
Relief pours through her, and she embraces him, and his arms come around her too, so unbelievably strong yet gentle around her, like a lion velveting its paws, and she presses her cheek to his for the first time—something she has, even lying next to William, long dreamed of—and smells the animal hides and the iron and the forest scent of him.
Something inside her, long kept in darkness, finally starts to bloom.
From behind her, Victor shouts: “Elizabeth, move away from it!”
She turns and sees the gun. She screams and lunges to shield Talos—just as fire erupts on her side.
Stillness. Victor stares at her in horror, the gun now loose in his hand.
Her thoughts stutter, a broken rhythm. What’s—what—happened? To me? Did Victor…did he. Did he shoot—?
With a deafening roar, Talos rushes Victor. Elizabeth is already stumbling back, falling onto the bed, struggling to breathe against the confines of her corset. Heat unfurls through her limbs, her heartbeat pulses through her head, the room tilts and sways. Everything after this is a blur: men rushing into the room. Screaming. Wet ripping sounds. Glass breaking. And above it all, a roaring, a roaring like the ocean, its waves covering her, smothering her, closing over her head.
~
The next thing she knows, Talos is reaching down, lifting her from the bed.
The pain in her side is fading, and when she looks down, she sees, to her faint relief, that the small spot of blood on her side has not spread. The bullet must only have clipped her, grazed her side.
She whispers into his ear: “Take me with you.” She inhales deeply and gets her breath back. More strongly she repeats, “Take me with you.” In case there is anyone in this room still alive; in case she needs to make it clear to whoever might be watching that this is her will. Not to God; God always knew.
But she doesn’t need to. No one stops them.
The man steps over something at the entrance to the room, and looking down, she sees Victor’s body, torn in two, in a pool of blood.
Her heart leaps. Not in terror or sorrow, but awe, that her
(love)
rescuer has the strength to literally break a man, to rip him in half like he is no more than a loaf of bread. Victor’s intestines are leaking out of the upper half of his body, and his face is contorted, hideous, in a silent scream.
William’s body, too, lies on the floor. This she doesn’t want to look at, but her feelings of grief are more like those for a dead friend, and they slide gently over her like the rose petals now raining down on them as they enter the main hall.
There is nothing for her here.
She turns back to press her face into Talos’s neck. I am with you, she thinks in a blur of sorrow and joy. I am safe.
Talos carries through the wedding hall, through all the finery she had never truly felt connected to. Through the rows of guests, frozen in shocked silence, rose petals still raining down on them. A silent snow.
Only when he steps over the threshold and out into the dark does Elizabeth finally feel like a bride.
Only in the raw breath of the night, her love holding her close and carrying her like she weighs less than a butterfly wing, does she feel like she is part of a sacred union at last. No false, simpering guests; no suffocating finery. Only the two of them in the night, only her own Creator watching over them, from beyond the firmament.
Only now, in the arms of a man everyone else would call a monster, does she finally feel blessed.