This one shouldn't be as sad as the others... I figured that probably you guys don't wanna read DEATH all the time so here you go...

The water of the blue pool glittered, the silver fish flashing beneath the rippling surface. 

The autumn leaves crackled like the fire they represented in the crisp air that nipped the wind.
A young woman with flowing red hair and pointed ears sat on a rock beside the pool, feet in the chilled water. 

She was tall for a woman, standing at six feet, her long limbs thin and muscular.
Her eyes were a brilliant shade of cobalt blue, contesting the pool she sat by in beauty.

She was the elven lady of the western wood, daughter of a long forgotten king.

Sikara was her name, representative of the trees that she loved so.  The trees that grew silver in the light of the moon and fiery gold in the burn of every autumn sun. 

Every day she sat by the pool, gazing at the rustling trees and the swallows that bickered in their leaves.

Her lands were always and forever at peace, not desiring her rule when they could rule themselves. 
And Sikara was content to leave them be.  

She was content to sleep in the woods, to live in the woods amongst the creatures of her realm. 

Her only children were her people, and her only oath and commitment to a life partner was to the trees and the little rivers that flowed through her domain.

She had no need for love, as her father had before her to her mother, simply content to remain in the pool with the fish and crawling creatures, lying among them as a selkie among seals.

For two thousand years she had grown into her land, swimming in the waters and walking in the trees. 

And though it had been so long, though she held to her oath of solitude, unspoken as it was, not here was an emptiness in her that the quiet fields and fragrant blooms could not fill.

He came in the form of a winged faerie, tall and broad shouldered, framed by eagles wings that stretched thrice his height. 

That dark hair of his that reminded her of river banks, eyes auburn that burned like the beloved leaves on every beloved tree. 

For he was as much a part of the earth and the water and the wind that she loved so much as any other creature.

And Sikara could not live without the entirety of her beloved earth.

A crunch of leaves underfoot alerted Sikara of a heavy presence.
The flutter of low hanging feathers on the soft earth.

"My love."

His voice was the soft rumbling purr of a mountain cat, the deep ripple of quiet wind on a lake, the music of a robin's song. 

It was weeks of being in the depths of the forests in one word. 

Sikara turned to face him, her one love, the only one who could fill the void in her heart that he had also created.

"Drakkar."

He smiled at her, and the warmth of summer sun filled her bones. 

She returned his smile, and her blue eyes flashed in the dying light.  They were, together, the forces of nature. 

Beautiful in peace and joy. 

Drakkar extended a hand to Sikara, and she took it, standing and linking her arm through his. 

They were magnificent, walking along the forest floor.  So great were they in their beauty and power that the trees stilled and bowed, the creatures of the land heeding their breath. 

In silence they walked, craving nothing more than the touch of hands and the presence of the other.  There was no carnal desire between them, nor a need to fill the intimacy of silence with words, cheapening the serenity. 

But every step with him, beside him, her arm on his, swelled Sikara with a craving that, in his absence, was beginning to make her morose, longing for his touch, for a whispered word.

Her heart felt things that she had never before known.  It was starlight in her veins, and lightning in her body.  She felt new, like a fawn still with her mother, yet the grace of her many years enriched what she felt for this faerie who had bewitched her and stolen her heart.

They stopped their stroll at a field, laying beneath a wide oak that sheltered a bush heavy with berries.
Sikara lay her head on Drakkar's chest, resting her hand beside her cheek, and he fed her berries, brushing the staining dye across her lips with his fingertips.

She hummed contentedly and traced patterns with her own finger over the fabric of his shirt.  Their movements were languid and slow, fitting of the day and the length of their lives, the time they still had together.

His hands stroked her hair and traced the tip of her ear, brushing over the point with lazy yet dutiful repetition.
His touch sent ice and fire through her body.

His voice, as he whispered sweet nothings in her ear and spoke of clouds and flowers and rain lulled her and made her eyes heavy with pleasant sleep.

And when she woke, Drakkar was there, still stroking her hair.

She smiled at him with unimaginable warmth, a look of love and affection and deep emotion that only he could return. 

"What were your dreams, my love?"  His voice was quiet, as if he were afraid to break the calm of the air.

Drakkar did not know that his voice was the air, his very breath the wind that rustled each leaf of grass. 

Sikara hummed and closed her eyes again.

"The wind and the air.  The voice of the birds and the frogs after rain.  And your touch, my love, though I have yet to wake from this fantasy of mine."

Drakkar lowered his lips to her hair and kissed her head.

"Then I plead you never wake," he murmured.

Sikara smiled and drifted back into darkness. 

...

The two of them spent no time apart, walking in the woods, swimming and spending all their leisure time in one another's arms. 

And the spoke of the things of their minds, of their hearts, of their worlds which had been two different entities until now. 

But of late his words had grown darker and full of question.

They would walk with one another and he would speak of beautiful things, dark things that flooded his dreams.

And Sikara became afraid, for Drakkar had changed. 

No longer was he the fair faerie she had known, and yet she still loved him.

His skin had grown pale, his eyes from fire to moonlight, his hair from earth to pitch. 

"There are whispers in corners of our world, Sikara, my love.  Words of power.  Under our hand and our might, your lands would expand.  We could rule the entirety of this place, and we would be beloved."

Sikara stopped him then, having heard these things in growing suspicion for months or years, what could have been decades if she had counted their days. 

And her eyes were full of sorrow. 

"Drakkar, what you say is not who you once were.  When did power and divine rule over these people become your passion, my love?"

He recoiled as though she had struck him.

Anger seethed in his eyes like an infection, and a darkness overcame him that Sikara thought banished and forgotten.

As quickly is it appeared his frightening fury was replaced with fervent apologies and pleas for forgiveness.

A wary relief flooded Sikara, as much as the fear that still lingered from moments before.

Her eyes beheld a physical change in Drakkar, reverting back towards his original and pure state, the silver in his eyes dimming and warming.

She still loved him deeply, as the only one she loved for eternity.  But there was a great and deep seated fear that Drakkar had come to greatly love another: power.

And even through days that went unaccounted, when Drakkar was once again fully hers, Sikara knew that the fear of his obsession would never truly flee her soul, nor did she believe that this lust of his would abandon him.

...

The blight spread through the land, first through the forests and trees and growing things.
Then to small creatures, and then the fair folk as it grew more and more jealous and full of greed for life.

It swept in as a dragon on a southern wind, striking and burning through bodies and minds in devastation.

Sikara was not the first to fever with this terrible plague, nor was she the last, but it ravaged the elven lady just the same, tearing with a scorching fever and turning blood silver.

Drakkar tended her day after day, sitting at her bedside in the manor grown into ancient oaks, watching as her skin grey pale and grey with the change of blood, as her eyes dimmed with every passing hour. 

The grief in his soul at her weakness and her impending death shattered what was left of his goodness, the light only knit together by Sikara herself.

But the disease, this plague of darkness had taken all that was dear to Sikara, almost knowingly forcing her to wait for death as she watched her people fall one by one daily. 

The light in her had also been greatly diminished. 

Each day her illness and her grief tore the beauty from her skin, her body quite literally burning away piece by piece.

Drakkar could no longer touch her skin, not for the plague it contained, but for the fire it now exuded in all it's scalding destruction. 

The darkness in her seemed to call to him, and some days he felt he could draw it from the world, as poison from a wound.  As if, at his beck and call, the despair and infection and black hatred would withdraw and bury its terrible power in his bones. 

But none of these things superseded the agony in his heart knowing that this love that would have been eternal was broken, that his life-companion, his chosen mate, was crumbling in the wake of this storm. 

Drakkar did not leave Sikara's side, even when the radiating fire from her skin scalded and singed him.  There was no remedy he could find, no reason or explanation for any of it. 

But for all of his grief and all of his sense of loss, there was no fear in Sikara's eyes at her dying, no pain, no regret.  She spoke with Drakkar until the sickness took her voice, and even then she opened her mind to his as she had so many times before.

Drakkar could not bear her silence, the fact that she had resigned herself to her fate. 

He did not sleep, nor did he eat, and it seemed he was beginning to waste away even as Sikara was.

Until their last day together, when the sun rose red, when panic flooded Drakkar's veins with all it's poisonous glory. 

Her skin began to coat with silver, with her blood, her face no longer the same elf it had once represented. 

She only smiled at him, and without a moment to spare, without a final glance at her, Drakkar thundered away from her bedside and took flight in the skies. 

His wings shook the poisoned air and his rage was the desperate cry that rattled the mountains. 

He roared his fury and his anguish. 

And underneath began the whispers that had seduced him so easily with talk of power. 

That now drew him closer again at the promise of eternity again, the promise of Sikara's eternity.

He let these dreams, these voices of silvered darkness consume him.

...
The power, the pure energy they now possessed had burned through their bodies, leaving them spirits of might and scalding strength.

They tore through worlds, through realms of fire and water and life and ruled over the remaining wastes as sovereigns.

Drakkar and Sikara, the most powerful beings in existence, fought and killed and ruled side by side, and with each new victory, their jealousy and lust for other realms grew greater.

With vengeance and a fierce love a blood, Drakkar brought glory to the darkness which had bestowed upon him this power and placed a queen at his side.

Until they found a place with no name, a place so like the one they had known, the one they had both been born to and born for. 

A place with elves and faeries just as fair as they had once been.

And new, weaker creatures that called themselves humans. 

So many of them, together in this realm...

There was no hesitation in Drakkar's heart when the darkness set him to take this place, this paradise that was built, created to be ruled.

For centuries the two of them, Sikara and Drakkar, abandoned their armies in desolate worlds and took hosts in their new conquest.

Beautiful hosts, who contained their power beautifully and with grace.

For years they used them to walk this world, instilling fear and love in the hearts of their new people.

But they were clever, the elves of this world, so clever to banish these two back to a dark and grey and dusty place, back with their armies.

So clever to curse them never to take another host, to wander the plains between realms forever with no form. 

And so grateful, Sikara was, this dark and ruined form that had been thrust upon her, that the evil containing her spirit had been stayed for a while longer, from corrupting the world she had come to love. 

Drakkar, in his oblivious glory and macabre joy kept her at his side, his Queen of the Void, never knowing that, while his heart had been damaged and corrupted, her's had remained pure and trapped. 

Unable to weep, unable to escape from the confines of her own mind, from this formless star she had become. 

And when Drakkar found his way, their way back to the lands of Ilgur and Sideon and all those beyond and between, she could not mourn either. 

...

Ending scene in the novel from Sikara's POV

...

She was afraid. 

So afraid, as she had never before been. 

Drakkar, somehow, had found hosts to hold them, hosts that did not belong to the curse of outcasts from so long ago. 

A human man and his wife. 

Her power moved her to possess the woman, a dark haired beauty with eyes like pools lit by stars. 

That brilliant, deep blue that Sikara hardly recognized after so long without seeing those same eyes in her reflection. 

This human woman was so like Sikara had once been.

And the man...

Her husband...

Drakkar's chosen vessel was not like Drakkar's original form in the slightest.

He was, without a doubt, an exact replica, with his golden eyes, the dark hair, the strong back and broad shoulders.

But she could not linger on his nostalgic beauty, for the thing inside her thrust her into the human woman's mind and forced a change on her that left an echoing scream in Sikara's skull...

Her skull...

The transition had been successful. 

But, as she felt the human woman, Kara, struggle in her mind and in her body, Sikara felt the darkness weaken and she whispered...

Kill me. 

With those words came the implication that Kara understood. 

She reached for a blade at her hip, fumbling with longer limbs and fingers. 

There was a shock of sadness and regret that shook Sikara to her core. 

Kara's husband, who had hoped he had convinced her to refrain from stabbing herself to kill the dark elf inside her, would not see the dagger plunge into her stomach, nor would he ever again say a kind word, or kiss his wife as her spirit dimmed and went out within her dying body. 

Gone forever, in whatever afterlife she and her mortal kin had hoped and prayed for.

But Sikara endured, however much she had faded, long enough that she could give the man the comfort of a final goodbye and closure. 

He would never know it was her who begged a kiss, for she not only wished comfort on this man, but knew that he would be her final goodbye to Drakkar, as he had once been, as she so longed for him to be again. 

She saw him when she looked at this human man, as her eyes dimmed and the body that she inhabited began to shut down. 

She begged him.

Begged a kiss, begged him to hold her and wept at his grief, at his clawing hands in her hair, at the hands that pressed to her wound. 

Pleaded one last time, one last "I love you."

...

And then an eternal peace of pale silk and warm waters consumed her. 

im sorry i know i said there wouldnt be death but i lied

i didnt know i lied until i wrote it XD