what is beyond love? I will meet you there.
cedric diggory
goblet of fire
extended summary inside!
beautiful cover by the wonderful @c4merag1rl !!
UPDATE 3/27: new epilogue added!! <3
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THUNDER CRACKLED through the heavens, searing the sky and leaving an uncontrollable trembling deep in her bones. The world seemed muffled in the wake of it, like someone had stuffed cotton in her ears, and in the dark of the night, deaf and blind, she stumbled around like a newborn child. The sky was so black it was as if every violet cluster of stars had been snuffed out, leaving bruises like impenetrable voids against the impossibly dark heavens. There was no light, not even a wink of it, anywhere.
Even the sun itself had died.
Elaine stumbled forward, the grass brittle and dry and dead beneath her bare feet. Rocks scuffed her heels, roots pulled at her steps. Ghostly fingers of fog wrapped frigid hands around her ankles, leeching the warmth from her blood like death. She had never felt so alone, so lost — like she'd become untethered from the earth. Hands outstretched, she fumbled for a lifeline in the darkness.
What she found first was a vine. It was thick and corded, coiled like a snake around what felt like a massive stone structure, cold and cracked, rough beneath her fleshy palm. Elaine gingerly ran her fingers along the vine — and abruptly withdrew them with a sharp hiss of pain.
Thorns. Crimson blood rushed to her pricked fingertips, bubbling red and hot as it fell to stain the dead ground. The quiet pattering of her blood against the grass filled her humming ears. It smelled like rot and ruin, like cloying, overripe fruit bursting with decay.
A sudden flash of lightning threw everything into searing, horrifying relief, and all at once, the world assaulted her eyes in an onslaught of too bright, too dark images.
A hooded visage of Death loomed over her with a single black crow perched upon his shoulder. From his scythe sprung the vine, thick with razor thorns and crowned with wilted, dying roses that wept with bloody petals. They fell like thunderclaps to the earth, each one a tolling of time expired.
With a cry, Elaine jerked back and fell to the ground, her back colliding with another massive slab of rock. Hesitantly, she raised her fingertips to search it, and the moment her blood touched the cool stone, light flared to life and pierced the dark like knives, letter by letter by letter. It was a gravestone.
