Tainted Elysium

• Revekah Regalado, Grade 12, Kingsway Christian College
• Short Story
• 2021

1st in the 'Play On Words 2021' competition

He bled. Crimson gushing down his spine like a raging river—and the pain was all he could feel. Gasping for breath, his glistening cerulean orbs begged for what his lips failed to utter. As his lungs struggled to take in oxygen, his gaze pleaded with her to escape.
“You wouldn’t leave my side… and neither will I yours,” Daerys murmured in a gentle whisper as she cradled him in her arms and planted a gentle kiss on his sweat mapped forehead.
“They’d have to kill me first.”
It was looked down upon. Their bond. It was shunned by society, said to go against high Seraphim law. The tainted could not associate with the light. It was forbidden. In this case, he was a mixblood—an outcast with obsidian wings who dared befriend and bare his soul to the daughter of the Supreme. And Daerys? Daerys was the purest of purebloods. By law, they could never be together for he could not be in her light-filled presence. But as children in the garden of Ethens, when she was but a child who sought nothing but friendship and genuine company—disappointed by those who had wanted her status rather than what she herself could offer as friend—it was the blue-eyed boy alone who offered her solace. He was her sense of serenity and comfort when she was unable to find a sense of belonging even in her own home.
Yet, in his hand of peace and acceptance, had she then unknowingly become his reason of chaotic destruction?
Daerys’ amber eyes were of pained warmth, waterworks threatening to escape as she took him in—holding him in his shattered state. In a soft voice, she herself pleaded with him as the life began to escape him. ‘Don’t leave my side… please…’
And yet, as he gazed at her once more, a loving smile resting on his lips in apology and the touch of his cool fingers against her tear-streaked cheek bringing her comfort, the life that wished to stay did not last as his cerulean orbs fluttered shut. A final breath and he was gone.
All she could feel was pain. He had given her everything and he had lost it all because of her. White bone and hollow space took the place of his once powerful and majestic obsidian wings. There he lay in his death, soul in a meridian of nothingness; body a motionless figure splayed in a pool of scarlet. Yet his beauty was greater than the corrupted palace her father had built. As her gaze travelled to the crimson stain transferred onto her silken silver robe, to the burnt black feathers cast off to the side, her kind eyes that had been filled with his cool serenity ignited into a blazing fire.
If his life had been stripped away for the crime of befriending and loving and sacrificing all for her, then she cared not if she were to lose her own life defying the creator of her grievous pain.