She is tired.
For perhaps the first time in her life, she is bone-tired.
Because there is life stirring in her gut, when there should only be death. Ironic, she thinks, or would think if she had any concept of irony, that Stave had both taken her life and given it to her.

She does not know that there are two heartbeats in her gut. Two pairs of eyes, two mouths, eight coltish limbs. With nothing to compare it to, she thinks this weight, this unbearable weight, is normal.

Oh, how she loathes it.

She lingers near the water where it is coolest, occasionally piercing her tongue with venom to dull the ache at the pit of her.

She turns her head slow, lazy when he emerges. Or materializes. She is uncertain of the extent of his magic, what he can do with it. Doesn’t care as much now as she once did. When she worshiped him. Before she learned that the feeling would never be mutual.

He says her name and she watches him a beat, considers telling him that he is wrong. She is not Gospel. She is some other foolish thing. But, in the end, she merely tips her head and says, “Ghaul.” Not as sweet or chaotic as the first time she’d let the word slip into the charged air between them.

But does she have anything to say to him? What is there to say?

“What would you like to speak about?”

Her first instinct is to recoil and to gnash her teeth and to curse him for daring to touch her. And if not for all that unbearable weight and the way the exhaustion has hollowed out her bones, she would have. But the most she can manage now, heavy and tired, is a low hiss. A hiss that has never worked to deter him before and certainly does not work now.

He beckons her closer but she does not budge, makes him come to her instead. A stiff embrace, certainly. And she wonders, quite abstractly, what he wants from her. She hates how weak the child in her gut has made her. So weak that she has spent the majority of her pregnancy hidden away, lest someone see her in such a state.

Perhaps it only makes sense that he should be the first one to find her. To find her without her fight. Just as they had found each other years before. Shivering, alone, all fight.

He murmurs into her mane and she lets him, wonders what it is he’s getting at. And then, when he bestows his gift upon her, she frowns in turn. She wants to cast herself out of his reach, to study his face, but he folds his wings around her and she is powerless.

“Pangea is yours,” she says, the only explanation. 

He has misunderstood her, all the more reason to loathe her condition.
He draws back his wings and she is grateful to be free of the weight of them. Even still, she feels some sharp stab of irritation.

But he takes this misconstrued meaning and he speaks and she can taste the desperation in his tone. It sits bitter and heavy on her tongue and she wants to hiss and spit but the pain and the weight and the exhaustion are too much to bear all at once. So, she merely stands there and she lets him speak.

She stands there, tired and weak and irritated with both, and allows him to drag his mouth across the plain of her forehead.

“It was meant as a form of congratulations, Ghaul,” she says and does not bother trying to conceal the barbed edges. Because this is the Gospel they both understand, the venom, and she draws her head away.

“You deserve the throne,” she continues, “I have no doubt that you will do great things with it.” But she does not want to be touched by him, not now, and she finally gathers what little remains of her energy so that she can draw herself away from him.

“You owe me nothing,” she adds, at last, “you never have. But, for you, I will look after the Cove.”

Perhaps there is still some part of her that worships him.

She remembers. Remembers the way they had curled themselves around one another, hissing and spitting and giggling with wild, reckless youth. She had belonged to him then. And her mother had come to fetch her and Gospel, she had pledged her allegiance to the darkness. Adna had been powerless to drag her away from him and her father had not even tried.

She bristles at his display of weakness, though his voice is hard now. Should anything happen to him. How she loathes his willingness to acknowledge that he, too, is merely flesh and blood and sinew when he has always been so much more than that. To her and to everyone else.

She remembers, too, when he had come to her delighting in his own blood.

His greatest friend. She sets her jaw and looks away, out over the water, wonders what this all means.

She does not doubt that she has what it takes to lead. And it does not surprise her that he has decided that she is the only one he can trust to look after the land in his absence. She skirts her tongue across a fanged tooth.

“Bring me Bethlehem,” she says.

Because now, more than ever, her father is absolutely nothing. But she smiles then, something cold and calculating, though he cannot see it. “It’s time that he and I spoke.”

She has never known power like this.
And she can see now how it might be a dangerous thing. But she has never shied away from danger, has always beckoned it to come closer, coaxed it out of hiding. She has always welcomed it. When she first set eyes on him, when Stave slowly bled the life out of her, there in the forest when darkness had loitered in her periphery and she had called it out of hiding.

But he grins something awful and she follows suit. Tilts her fine head as he presses a chaste kiss into the plain of her forehead and then takes one shuffling step backward, away from her.

She watches him go. And feels awash in that same delicious glow as he studies her. She had belonged to him once.

She had belonged to him once.

And now. And now he has risen to more appropriate power and she is following keenly in his footsteps.

His question deepens her lilting smirk and she turns her gaze out over the water again.

“I’ll take care of him.”