She likes the Ruins, even if they don’t really feel as if they belong here.

The wars fought here were not theirs, and she does not know who the blood long-since dried into the dirt belongs to, but there is a haunted quality to it that feels familiar. It feels the way she imagines it might look like if someone split her open — the wreckage of something once beautiful, the kind of thing you look at and wonder what it had looked like before it was torn apart but somehow knowing that to rebuild it would mean you lose some of the original allure.

She is used to being made up of broken parts, pieced together with both magic and a strange, suffering kind of willpower — an unyielding need to stay alive but to regret nearly every moment of it. She cannot explain why being here feels like a knot finally loosening in her chest, as if the mist that hangs in the air is easier to choke on than breathing in the too-sweet air of the meadow.

The gold that is streaked across the ground catches her eye, and she pauses  momentarily to survey it. She leaves behind her own trail of shimmering stardust, but this is different, almost blood-like. It leads her to a stallion, dapple gray (and of course her wretched little heart lurches for just a moment, as it always does) with a crown of thorns digging cruelly into his skin, streaked in crimson and gold.

“Jarris,” she breathes his name, and it feels familiar even though she can’t be sure she has ever spoken it. Maybe it is just her magic retrieving his name, but it feels deeper than that. His blood pulses and hers keeps time, and all at once she is brought back to a feeling of crushing despair and hopelessness, of sharp rocks and an unforgiving ocean — and the sensation of her immortality being ripped away, called by someone else. “I know you. But…I don’t know if you ever knew me,” she says, a soft frown forming under the golden light of the halo that hovers above her head. “My name is Ryatah.”

It is always strange to meet someone that drags her back in time.

Most of her life feels as if it is always hurtling forward — another change, another heartbreak, another love, another disaster. She has never been the type to look back, always perhaps a little too eager to leave the past behind her. It’s why she can love someone new without any reservations; it’s why she can launch headfirst into danger without thinking about what happened the last time she did that. She moves on before the wound is even healed, but she never loses the scars.

She doesn’t fully remember why she had gone to the beach that day; maybe her heart had been broken, or maybe life had felt impossibly heavy and empty and too long. She’s always had a bad habit of seeking relief from stagnation in violent ways, and she is sure that day hadn’t been any different.

“The immortality that you have,” she begins, just as she reaches into him to ever so gently pull at it, a curious look shadowing her face. She forgets sometimes what she can do with magic; that she can feel that golden thread of life, and for a moment she marvels at the fact that she could take it back if she wanted. She can feel the way it hums and shifts in response to her, and she is so unaccustomed to having control over anything at all that she can feel an alien greediness flare to life inside of her.

But the feeling passes and she releases her hold on it, letting it settle back into his veins and her nearly-black eyes are once again soft as they meet his storm-gray own. “It used to be mine. Something strange happened that day, and when I died it found you.” She thinks back to that dark, peculiar feeling from just moments before, and as if in reminder to herself she reassures him, “It’s yours, now. It was a gift to me—” she thinks of Moselle, the queen of the Dale that Carnage had unseated in the name of the Valley, and how she had granted immortality to her as a promise of protection for the kingdom “—and now I suppose a gift from me to you.”

Her gaze unknowingly drifts to the crown of thorns that dig into his skin, down to the golden tears that carve paths across  his cheeks. She does not even realize when she is reaching out to brush her porcelain-white muzzle across his cheek, smearing the bloodied gold across both their skin as she asks, “were these a gift, too?” because she knows all too well that not all gifts are kind.

There is something familiar about him beyond their immortality.
She had felt it when she had reached into him, a likeness in their blood, in their wretched hearts. In herself, she sees it as a flaw. Her heart cannot be trusted — it breaks itself over and over in search of love in places that it simply cannot exist, tries to plant itself into blighted ground where anything that grows has no choice but to be corrupted. On the few occasions something sweeter has bloomed by chance, she discards nearly as quickly as it blossomed, that selfish, greedy heart of hers never quite satisfied. In the wake of her own heartbreak she leaves scorched relationships and the bitter taste of her name on the tongues of those who had tried to love her.

She knows it’s wrong.
She feels bad, of course; her remorse is a genuine thing, but until recently it had not been enough to stop her. Being in love had never kept her from looking elsewhere; Carnage didn’t typically care what she did with her time when he was gone, but until Atrox none of the others had managed to hold her attention for long. He is the only reason her endless pursuit of love came to a pause, and he is the only thing in the back of her mind that tells her she cannot follow this strange invisible string pulling her towards the gilded, bleeding man in front of her, no matter how beautiful she thinks his own tragic heart must be.

“I am not free of sin, either,” she tells him, and she says it so easily, as if her list of sins would not be offensively long. “If you don’t think you are worthy of the time immortality gave you, I promise it was no better off with me.” She tilts her head, a small smile on her lips that are now stained by his golden tears and his blood. “Do you want the thorns gone? I could remove them, I think.” She is not well practiced in using her magic on others but she could not walk away without offering, even though she secretly likes the way the rivulets of gold shimmer on his skin.