My heart pounded in my chest. My legs felt like jelly, and my breath was short and raspy. I could pass out any second.

But I couldn't quit.

I just couldn't. Quitting would mean bad things for me. Imprisonment maybe, or, most likely, certain death. I couldn't be caught after what had happened last time I tried to escape.

In a haze, I watched the sand fly up on each side of my sprinting body, the bare numbness of my feet spreading through my body from where my toes barely touched the cold water.

I couldn't be caught. I couldn't be caught. I couldn't be caught.

The cliff line blurred past me in a mass of browns and whites and golds, the early morning sun reflecting off the ragged basalt.

I had no idea where I was going, or when I would stop. My time was running out; I couldn't run forever.

The blood pulsing in my ears like a drum distract me from the noises I should be tuned into around me. I should be listening for footsteps, rustles the tough grass in the dunes. The tightening of bow strings and the rushing of arrows.

They fall around me like rain, the arrows. They fall like specks of silver tears aimed at my heart. I still run. It was harder to hit a moving target, mama had always tolld me, but still, time slowed in that cliche way that it does before one arrow thuds into my side, and another deep into my arm.

I'm thrown backwards, closer to the water, my head whacking against the pebbles and shells. Whether the cracking was the shells or my skull, I didn't know. I still groan in pain, rolling to my side and coughing up blood.

There's shouting in the distance as I shiver and wretch, staring at the sky above me, listening to the slow lapping of the waves below my head. Their slow, pulsing rhythm pulls me closer to them and unconsciousness until I am barely aware of the tearing of fabric and being lifted from the ground before having something tied tightly around my eyes.

Please don't let me die. I'm not meant to die like this. Not from mortal wounds.

~~○~~

"Please, ceann daor, I do not wish to lose this life from the wounds of my body, but in the satisfaction of my heart," My fingers trace the sharp angles of his face, the brush of his eyelashes telling me his eyes were clenched tight without having to take of my tight blindfold.

"Le do thoil," My voice was a rasp, but my breath steady. I could feel the dark blood seeping into the sand below me, my fingers pulling up clumps of sand.

His fingers lifted my head from his knee for one moment as he untied the ripped cloth from around my head, his hands shaking.

My eyes were already open, staring at him for a long minute, taking him in, breathing him in. His golden curls were threaded through with sand and crusted with salt, curling around his ears. His eyes were screwed shut as though in pain.

"Don't. Open your eyes, Please," My nails dig into the sides of his tanned face, the scattering of freckles having increased since the time I had seen him last.

He reaches up his hands, gripping my wrists lightly and pulls them away from himself, the rough calluses from years of fighting brushing against the bloody mess that were mine. Where my nails had dug in, small streams of blood were trailing down the sharp slopes of his cheekbones and dripping from his chin like tears. But they were already healing, the skin knitting itself together as though they were blurred by a painter with their paintbrush.

After drawing me to his leather-clad chest, I feel drops of water on my face, salty as they fell on my lips, washing away the blood.

I look up at him, my own eyes flooding, the tears dripping down onto the sand, mixing with the pool of claret like a sea around us.

His eyes had opened.

Every flash of green I had seen in my life was packed into his eyes, the bright emeralds of necklaces, the mossy greens of the forest, the bright greens of the valleys and the hills, the warm muddy colour of seaweed washed up on the beach, the basil seasoned in food, the pine of trees. Golds laced through it, glassy with a teary sheen.

His voice was cracked and broken, tears coming down in torrents now as my skin began to heat up with fire under my skin, "Don't leave me, Please."

"I'll be back, William, I'll be back. I always do come back."

My hands drop from his arms as the fingertips swirl into the air in flakes of metallic colour as I locked eyes with him again, promising him the promise I promised him each time.

"Goodbye," then my heart exploded. I scream, my soul swirling into a tight ball before it flames up into the air in a mass of golds and silvers and coppers and blues that swirl around him until they fade away, leaving him clutching at empty air, the deep lake surrounding his mind aswell as his body.

The wind whispered, Goodbye.