I did say this would help me write...

[skull_bearer]

TITLE: Eclipse
AUTHOR: Skull Bearer
FANDOM: Dragonlance
PAIRING: Raistlin/Dalamar
GENRE: Slash
TABLE: Here
PROMPT: 16, Symmetry
RATING: PG
WORD COUNT: 1000
SUMMARY: A celestial event casts long shadows on the future.
WARNINGS: Mildly disturbing? References to sex, but nothing graphic.
DISCLAIMER: Ownership disputable *arms self*.

Who's going to save the children now?
These fallen soldiers?
How did we let it get this bad?
Track 2, Amiga

Raistlin stretched his legs out, and pressed his face into the crook of Dalamar's neck. The elf's hand came up and carded through his hair, gently untangling the snags and knots he came across.
"Tired." Raistlin mumbled.
"I know," He felt the words rumbled in the elf's throat. "It won't be long now."
Raistlin nodded sleepily and felt his eyes start to slip closed. The last time he'd waited for this, he'd stabbed his finger with a splinter to stay awake rather than hope Caramon would remember to wake him up in time. Dalamar's hand came to rest on his back, rubbing small circles through his robes.
"Hmm..." Raistlin smiled, then yelped and started upright as the elf pinched him.
"Don't fall asleep on top of me." Dalamar smiled.
Raistlin rubbed the sore spot and send the Dark elf a look of sleepy recrimination, which was ruined by a jaw-splitting yawn. "Care to keep me awake?" He gave the best lascivious smile he could manage.
Dalamar chuckled, "Now, that is tempting," He looked up at the sky, almost time. "And if we get the timing right, very symbolic." He smiled again, but just as Raistlin was wondering if he was going to regret this and end up falling asleep beneath Dalamar mid-coitus, the elf shook his head. "But no, I'm tired as well and I doubt we'd be able to get undressed in time."
He lifted his arm, and Raistlin was very glad to accept the invitation and return to the warm and very comfortable embrace he'd been occupying before.
"I'll pinch you again if you nod off." Dalamar murmured through barely parted lips, head craned back to study the heavens.
"You wouldn't dare." Raistlin's lips brushed the exposed skin of his neck. "I might end up biting you in reflex."
"I might consider that an invitation." Dalamar retorted, then "Shhh, its beginning."

Raistlin lifted his head, and rested it on Dalamar's shoulder as the red gleam of Lunitari and the dark hole of Nuitari rose to the apex of the night sky. Solinari was nowhere in sight and as the strange shadow crept over the scarlet disk, the night grew ever darker.
"What does it look like?" As incredible, and slightly disturbing, as it seemed to Raistlin, he wondered what it would look like with Nuitari as more than just a shadow in the void.
"Shhh." Dalamar whispered, one hand still absent-mindedly stroking Raistlin's hair. "In Silvanesti they called it the Dragonqueen's eye. The night where their beloved E'li couldn't protect them. The night all stayed indoors rather than attract Her wrath."

Lunitari was almost completely eclipsed now, and Raistlin was no longer tired. A strange, frightening feeling passed through him, even while an equally strange, even more frightening kind of savage joy swept Dalamar's features. His grey eyes gleamed, reflections of red-rimmed black glittering in their depths. The hand on Raistlin's shoulder tightened, nails digging in, not so tight as to hurt, but hard enough to be impossible to ignore.

Raistlin had seen the sun eclipsed before, though it had been Solinari rather than Nuitari that had passed across its face. Meggin had warned him against staring directly at it, so he had spent the time in the Inn of the Last Home, watching it through the tinted glass of the windows. It had been strange, and he'd felt the moon's power as it had passed overhead, but nothing like this. He had felt Lunitari's power, the power of High Sanction, only to feel it ebb away instantly as the black moon blotted it from the night sky. He felt his magic shiver, away from the power of his patron.

It seemed like an eternity before the first slivers of scarlet began to appear again, and the warmth of the power flowed through him again.
Raistlin didn't realise he had been holding his breath, but his lungs were bursting. He let it out slowly, only to feel it catch.

Dear Gods not now!

Too late. Raistlin doubled over, choking, trying to cough and draw breath at the same time. For a split second Dalamar just looked at him, and for a split second Raistlin what the elf must see when he looked at his patron moon; light, black as pitch but still light, that seemed to edge around the elf's body, around his hands and face, burning black in his eyes. For a moment Dalamar just looked at him as though he'd never seen him before.
Then the moment passed, and the light faded as though it had never been, and it was just Dalamar sitting there. Dalamar the dark elf, Dalamar of flesh and blood and barely hidden annoyance at having this interrupted.

Oh, as though I had a choice!

The coughs bent him double again and all he could see was the thin grass, almost grey in the red light. He coughed and coughed and spat up blood, and that was black. He felt Dalamar's hands turn him around and rub his back, a familiar sensation that loosened the knotted muscles and allowed Raistlin to drag in a painful breath.
He stayed like that for a while, hunched over and trying to breath, cursing whatever Gods had chosen for him to have a coughing fit now of all times.

Or was it the Gods?

Raistlin drew in a rattling breath and straightened up painfully, looking up at Nuitari. Dalamar wasn't the only one who called the black moon patron.
He wiped his mouth, wincing at the wet feeling of blood, then spat the last of it on the ground, partly to rid his mouth of the taste, but more as a curse to the dark mage that had put him through this.