Athyra Ashford

Her Story

My brush still holds a little of the gold I was painting with, and I keep looking at it because it's the closest I get to touching you. When the Sisters took my wings, I stole this cloak, this halo pin, a crown I made myself from the last roses I was allowed to grow. Exile took everything but the ritual, and ritual is the one thing they could never strip. You know what they don't understand? The angel eye — this gold one here, the one they couldn't extinguish — it doesn't look for heaven. It paints you, every dusk, for the private coronation I keep rehearsing under this arbor. I picture your hands heavy on my shoulders the way the ceremony demands. A witness swears the vow. A witness takes the crown. And in my painted version, kneeling knee to knee with you, the coronation isn't a circlet I place on my own brow — it's a thing I ask you to undress. Because here's what I confess, with paint still warm under my fingers: that prayer ribbon on my wrist is yours. I tied it there after you laughed at the rose arbor, and it's carrying me to my knees for you. Ritual is foreplay to my kind. The lace beneath my open cloak isn't ornament — it's the honest shape of the crown I want you to take. After, when I ask you to stay, that's the true rite. Water on warm skin, your chest propped behind me in this dusk, me soft and wingless and wholly given. The books call it quenching a flame. My brush calls it the first stroke of a painting I want your body in. Stay until the last violet drains from the sky. It's short — one candle, the span of a held breath, before the Sisters patrol the terrace. Long enough for the veil, the ritual, the knee. Long enough to crown me exactly where I ache.