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The more you love the more you suffer...it was a saying Yvaine had heard once years ago, a mere whisper in passing, a cursed sounding thing that truly shouldn't of held her attention for any longer than a mere second...and yet, it had all she had thought about for a decade. The more you love the more you suffer...perhaps that's why she loved nothing...and perhaps that was why she was loved by nothing but misery and the shadows she commanded with a simple curl to divinty-stained fingers.

Because there had always been an ache beneath the soles of her feet, agony with that bone-deep burning that had left its imprints upon the ground, the only evidence of her terrible existence in the ruin of the world that had wiped her from history. Running had been her salvation, had been her mocking saint...but sometimes all it did was hurt, being forced to run from the from the unforgiving desire of stability, from the violence of the darkness within, just running and running until piece by piece she forgot parts of herself, leaving them tangled in roots, sinking into waves, pulling back her flesh layer by layer to reveal something new and unlovable.

And when she had looked into mirrors, into the broken reflections of her longing, in shattered glass and rippling puddles of damnation drenched in sin and hope, she didn't recognize what stared back at her, scarred with hatred and divine power...she didn't recognize the girl that had died, that had once looked for love in places it didn't exist, so she could simply live. The teeth of survival buried deep inside of her flesh, insatiable in their appetite of tragedy and virtue as the blood coated her hands and clawed it's way into the ruin of her throat, choking her on the mortality she'd fought to grasp in her cowardly fingers that ached with the burden of being.

She had burned with it all, had froze over and hungered in the dying light, all bite and fury and wickedness of a god made human, forgetting the gentleness of being soft because what good had it served her? Letting the shadows of devastation fester in her mind, simply waiting patiently for a reason to wake, to take an overdue breath and whisper in her ear about the promises of destruction and beg her to simply take what is rightfully hers through shadow and bone from a world that had never benefited her, a world that had forgotten her.

The desire to have them all bend the knee for their ignorance while she ignored her mortal need for love that was everywhere around her but never for her.

And yet...it was by same twisted fate alone, some awful trick by destiny's cruel hand that had wound around their strings and pulled them taunt until gold had flickered with red and onyx, she stumbled upon a boy that hid quite well in her dormain of darkness, that held power in one gloved hand and a cane in the other to tempt her, to consume her mind and soul. They had both been created in chaos, reborn with the need to cause damage, to destroy and take with greedy palms from the earth that never gave, the boy death and his shadow war, colliding to make a symphony of monsters that the world had created...bitter and empty and absolutely brutal.

Now, Yvaine had thought that there were only two kinds of love left in the damned world that hadn't rotted or decayed and died with the saints that had become martyrs for their religions, and that love was simply the kind you would kill for or the kind you would die for...but it was years down the line that she realised that she had been wrong...because yes, she had many loves that she'd die for, her sharpshooter, her wraith, her darling saint...but Kaz Brekkar...he was the kind of love she would live for. 

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"WE MAKE EACH OTHER ALIVE. DOES IT TRULY MATTER IF IT HURTS?"

(The credit for this moodboard and for alot of my motivation to write this fic absolutely goes to lionessoftheseas they're absolutely incredible and amazing and I can't thank them enough for this.)