The thought of calling his bluff had crossed her mind, sharp and undeniable, but bright red like a warning.

If it had been anyone else, she would have.
There has always been a sick part of her that relished in exactly this—in their leaving, so that she might splinter and break around the ache of it. It was a high she couldn’t get anywhere else, a rush that only the aftermath of self-destruction could bring, and she hates herself for being able to admit that she has never regretted doing it a single time.

She might miss them—she might spend nights wondering what if, what if, what if, while all the scars across her heart flared to life—but nothing healed her shattered heart quite like letting it fall in love with someone else.

But Carnage is different; she knows he means what he says.
And for all the twisted, wicked games they have played, never before has he threatened to leave.

She believes him when he says it, just as she believes that she would never even be given the chance to beg him to stay.

Instead of quieting the panic that had taken root in her chest, she let it blossom.
She needed that quickened pulse and that desperation, she needed the image of stars collapsing in on themselves, and black holes she will never find her way out of, because she needs to think that is what is waiting for her on the other side of this should she fail, should he leave.

She goes to the Ruins, because she likes the haunted, graveyard feel of it. They are well into the thick of the night, the sky a near-black and glittering with stars in the space between the soft gray wisps of clouds, and the quiet around her feels taut. She doesn’t know how she will choose; she only knows that she is not made for this, and she hesitates.

She hesitates, and something alights in her veins, the thread that binds her magic to him suddenly like a livewire, and instead of being afraid she wants more, wants him.
She cannot fail, not this time.

And since she is not made for this, she makes herself into something that could be, something divinely terrifying and unrecognizable.

The stark, glowing white of her skin remains, but that usually amber-soft glow of a halo disappears into a nearly blinding light, enough to obscure her face and make her difficult to look at for too long. From her back erupt two sets of wings, golden and showering stardust, but across their entire expanse are innumerable pairs of nearly-black eyes, just like her own, some staring, some blinking slowly. Every scar that had once marked her body—her chest where her own heart had been ripped, a jagged slice across her throat, Carnage’s brand on her hip—bleed a glittering gold, leaving tracks down her porcelain-white skin.

She finds her, the girl carved from night, and simultaneously knows she is the one while wishing she weren’t.
Memories flood her mind unbidden, of someone else she had known that had seemed to be crafted of the night itself, of the way he had whispered angel into her neck countless times, and how she had broken every promise she ever made to him.

“Don’t be afraid,” she tells her as she approaches, and her usually soft voice seems to split a hundred different ways, the sound dissonant and jarring as the vocals layer on top of each other, the seraphic glow seeming to chase away the dark. “I knew someone who looked like you, once.”

The first thing she notices is that the stranger has a lovely smile.
How she smiles even though her voice wavers with trepidation, and how she looks at her with both awe and fear.

It stirs something inside of her, and that piece of darkness that had burrowed itself into her after she had been trapped in the void begins to uncoil in response, as if drawn towards the admiration like a moth to flame. For once, she heeds the darkness rather than quells it. She lets it spread, from heart to lung to blood to bone, feels it sink into her marrow alongside the magic that still echoes of him, and whatever guilt she may have felt for dragging an innocent stranger into her and Carnage’s game is forgotten.

The mare asks her if she is a god, and she exhales a short, quiet laugh. “No, just an angel,” she answers, and she thinks of the irony. That she is here because of a god, because he insists on testing her devotion even though she is certain they both know that there is no one earthside that could possibly love him more. She liked to think that she has proven that already, that the scars across her heart and body are a testimony to what she is willing to withstand, but if he needed more, needed this, then she would give it to him.

She steps forward, her face still obscured by the too-bright light of her halo, hiding too the flicker of sorrow—of an apology—in her eyes. The eyes on her wings give away nothing, reflecting only the stranger’s stars on their glossy surface, blending with the real night sky above. She reaches for her with her magic, an imperceptible exploration. She feels the pulsing heart, letting the steady thrum of it take up space alongside her own, their beats synchronizing. She does not know why, but she needs to feel her first, wants to know this heart that she is going to take. Perhaps she wrongly feels that by putting the effort into caring, into knowing, that the act will not feel so ruthless.

“But if a god came to you and asked you for something,” she begins, voice soft and kind as always, the unsettling dissonance from earlier now gone, “would you give it?”