She sees him along the riverbank, and for a long while she simply watches him from where she stands.

The Pampas is not a familiar land to her, as most of the newer lands were not. Most of her time had been spent in Tephra, Hyaline, or Taiga, and she tried not to think of how she likely would never see any of them again: just like the valley and the dale. The grasslands are unexpectedly lovely, though, and wandering the wildflower-filled fields and following the lazy curve of the river has served as a distraction from the darkness that now pulsed in her chest like a heartbeat.

She thinks it is just her imagination that it feels stronger; thinks it is just her imagination that it is even there at all. She had been trapped in the black void for so long that she does not always trust that she has returned to normal—or at least her version of it. She thinks she is just restless, that it is just the tension around her after the flood and the storms—her empathy drawing in everything negative, and she not taking the time to filter it out.

She sees him, though, and realizes it is not just her imagination. Something rises up in her chest, a tangible thread of darkness that feels both drawn to and repulsed by him—a remnant of shadow that followed her home from the void, burrowed into her veins.

But he is not the first one to kill her, and likely will not be the last. He is not the first man to hurt her.
Turning from him does not even cross her mind.

When she walks towards him it is with carefully veiled caution, giving the appearance of ease even though her pulse is thrumming. She is the same as she had been before, with the golden halo and golden wings, and stardust that trails from the ends of them to the ground. But the scar on her chest from where he had ripped out her heart remains, perhaps some masochistic part of her subconscious that did not want to heal the wound all the way, or perhaps because it took far more energy to regrow a heart and she could not be bothered to concern herself with the scar.

“Gale,” she stops a fair distance from him, watching him with eerily calm, dark eyes, and a placid kind of smile hardly touching her lips. She does not hate him; there is no malice in her tone, no disgust on her face. There is only a tentative distrust. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Even though she had never known him well before, she can see that he is different. There is something about him that has changed, his skin electric but his demeanor subdued, though she is not foolish enough to trust it. She is no stranger to kind words being spoken between sharp teeth, and the only version of Gale that she knows is unpredictable.

She does not know what sets him off.
She does not know what causes him to go from being placid and unassuming to cold-blooded and ruthless; from smiling lips to a mouth soaked with her blood.

But she is a creature that has always thrived on fear, on walking fine lines and knowingly crossing them. If it weren’t for the strange feeling of darkness inside of her chest this would have felt like the same game she has always played. The darkness unsettles her, though, and makes her suddenly doubt her own usually steadfast nature.

Despite her uneasiness, she finds that she immediately shakes her head when he asks if he should leave. “No,” she says, even if the hesitation in her voice and wariness in her eyes nearly betrays her words. She thinks of telling him what she had been thinking earlier—how he is not the first to kill her, that she has died before—but finds instead that the difference in him is what has piqued her curiosity the most. “You seem different from before. Do you still hate angels?” This time there is a whisper of humor to her voice, as she slowly eases herself against the invisible boundary that resides between them.

It does not escape her that he uses the word it, implying that he and the version of himself that had unleashed such chaos across two kingdoms were separate from one another. She is inclined to believe him, since he doesn’t really have a reason to lie to her—she has been hurt numerous times by those she cares about, and no one has ever attempted to spare her feelings by lying to her, and she does not expect an almost stranger to do so either. They have spilled her blood and buried painful words like barbs into her mind, faulting her for every misstep, and never did they soften their blows with lies or excuses.

Perhaps that is her own moral flaw, to so easily turn a blind eye to the cruel things that others do; to forgive and pretend to forget for the sake of avoiding conflict.
To allow herself to shoulder the blame in some way, so long as it means she will not have to endure being alone; so long as it means they will keep coming back.

She makes a soft hum of acknowledgement to what he says about Mazikeen not letting him—it—hunt angels, but does not say anything else. It had been her that had healed Maze when the cursed creature had left her nearly dead on the shores of Hyaline, but she finds herself wondering why he had obeyed the fiery mare’s request to not harm Ryatah while not doing the same for Maze herself. She is all too familiar, though, with how twisted and impossibly complicated relationships like that could be—she is sure she has forgiven Carnage for similar, if not worse things.

“How can you be sure the curse is broken for good?” she asks, her dark eyes sweeping across his face with a hint of skepticism although her tone is mostly curious. She could not lie that she found the idea of being cursed mildly interesting; the thought that one could supposedly do things so wildly out of character, things that they would never usually do. She wants to know more, wants to follow that familiar pull of darkness that she can never quite resist. “You said familial. Is there a possibility it simply lives in someone else now?”

She does not question him further on the curse, and instead only gives a faint, silent nod of her head. Curses and magic were tricky things, based on her experience with both. If there is one thing her often tumultuous life has taught her is that nothing is permanent, and nothing is ever for certain.

She has no doubt that if the curse wanted to find a way into a new host that it would do so, and she is sure Gale does not need to be reminded of this.

He asks her if she is alright, and a strange look passes over her face. Perhaps it is the surprise of being asked the question by the very individual that had brought her harm, because she cannot recall that ever happening. Apologies were a rarity for her, and they often came disguised as something else—illusions of beloved places long-gone, being surrounded by and covered in stars, or sometimes simply ignoring a previous conflict and letting it slip away.

“I’m fine,” she finally answers, but even to her it sounds incomplete, empty. She is fine, she supposes, in the same way that she has always been fine. Brokenness had become normal so long ago that she does not remember anything else, and in a way the void was simply one more scar, one more haunted memory. But even she knew that the void had changed her in a far more visceral way than anything she had experienced prior—that the darkness had crept in through all of her cracks, and now it lived alongside her heart and blood and bones.

There is a small smile that pulls at her lips, an attempt to ignore the unease that shifts in her chest whenever she thinks of the infinite dark, the impossible silence, and the madness that had followed her for months after returning. “I must say, of all the times that I have died that is the first that I ended up somewhere like…that.” She can’t help but to think of Carnage, and how the void reminded her of the way he could build worlds to fit his every whim—and how not even he had subjected her to such a place. “It wasn’t my favorite, if I’m being honest, I think I preferred the bottom of the sea.” She is not sure if he will find humor in her morbid lightheartedness, but she smiles all the same, and then asks, “Will you be staying in the Pampas?”

She knows that the story of her life is not the preferred taste for some, if not most. It was mostly darkness with a few streaks of light—just enough to lend a false sense of hope, a shimmering beacon guiding her from one mistake to the next. The choices that she made to survive many would find bitter and difficult to swallow, but without seeing her beginning—without seeing the way the jungle in that far-off long-dead land had molded her in a way that was irreversible—it is impossible to fully grasp how she had no choice but to become what she had become.

She had learned to thrive off being broken and finding a way to rebuild herself from the shattered pieces.
She learned how to find allyship (though sometimes precarious it may be) in what should have been enemies, aligning herself with a darkness that she never should have found herself so close to.

But all those changes, all those numerous times she had been dealt a blow that might have unraveled someone else had given her a strength for forgiveness that was nearly unmatched, and it is only because of all those who had wronged her in the past that she finds it so easy to look Gale in the eye. The scar on her chest does not twinge or burn in memory of what he had done, and even though the apprehension and an echo of fear still lingers in her mind, she is just as willing to give him a second chance as she would be with anyone, and the pleased smile that she gives in response to him saying he would like to stay says as much.

“I am, actually,” she answers him, and where some might have adopted a note of pride at such a thing, her own tone remains level. She is not sure if it counts as being in charge, and she did mostly so that if anyone did long for the solidarity of a kingdom she could provide it. The world had fallen into chaos but the Pampas, so far, remained at peace. “Though I can’t say I’ve really done much. Mostly I have just been trying to ensure others know that we are available if someone is in search of a home, now that everywhere else is gone.”