"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
It seemed so obvious, now, that she could have always come home to her mother’s soft embrace. Life has been easy in Tephra with Prayer growing stronger every day and her mother telling her all about the things she’s missed. Leliana leaves out the worst parts of the war but she grooms Sabbath’s hair and explains how her father’s curse is broken. The magician thinks maybe Sabbath’s could be lifted, as well. Each night, she sleeps in the bed of flowers her mother grows for her and she kisses her tiny daughter goodnight. Life is picturesque and nothing could harm their perfect reality that her parents have bought with their own blood and sweat.
At least, she tells herself this.
But the Tephran queen’s heart aches for all her children to come home and so the serpent girl sets out in search of her older sister. Some part of Sabbath knows that Vulgaris loves Adna best but he is careful to shower each of their growing brood with affection. Somehow, she doesn’t mind being the second favorite so long as he makes time for her still. When he isn’t chasing the twins or chiding Chronos for luring Larke on some wild adventure, he finds a moment to gather them all for bonding time. How much better it could be with the other viper girl there beside her.
She chooses to search the river first because that is where they always come when their hearts are aching. Anything worth remembering has always happened here. Somewhere in these running waters, the other half of her horn is probably buried in the mud or still bobbing along. A part of her regrets it now but it made her pain into something real, something she could nurse and care for instead of a pincushion little heart. Her green doe eyes search the area for the other half of her soul and it doesn’t take long to pick her out of the crowd.
While Adna is still dark, Sabbath has begun to lighten with little red dapples marking her skin. She hadn’t wanted to change color over time and a part of her envied her sister for not going through this but she’s outgrown the jealousy, for the most part. Perhaps they were too much alike in the beginning. Sabbath is quick to close the distance between them, slender legs carrying her right up to the other girl so she can bury her face in Adna’s strong shoulder. It feels so good to feel their scales meeting again, like a second homecoming just for them. She smells all the places her sister has been and she exhales them with a smile on her soft face. For now, the fire in her soul is content to be a quiet smoldering ember.
“I’m sorry I stayed gone from you for so long. I should have gone looking for you, but I wanted to be alone,” she explains with her face still tucked in the black locks of Adna’s mane. “Things are really different this time. Father gave up everything for us. You should see how much his face has changed.”
And she laughs, surprised at how easy it comes to her without some self-deprecating joke right before.
“Are you.. Are you having a baby? I.. have a daughter now. I want you to meet her.”
She grows shy, eager to boast of how beautiful Prayer is, but she contains herself for now. Part of Sabbath worries that perhaps that vile angel boy from Loess fathered this child after breaking her sister’s porcelain heart. The slumbering ember of her heart briefly flickers to life, suddenly awoken by that hunger for vengeance, but she pushes it down for now. Some other day.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Adna has been afraid to see her family again. Afraid to look at them and know just how happy they are and how she, somehow, has not yet been able to find her own joy. She is afraid to look at them and know that she is the defective one; that even her father has been able to cast off his own shadows and she has been consumed with them—even though she has experienced but a fraction of the trauma that he has.
So she avoids them even though she misses them daily.
She avoids them even when her heart clenches in her chest at the memory.
It is is a strange feeling when she finally sees her sister, when she comes right up like no time has passed between them. Sabbath tucks into her chest and Adna doesn’t fight the feeling. She just pulls her close and presses a kiss to her neck, smoothing the scales and feeling that strange sensation of right in her veins.
She doesn’t say anything and doesn’t mention the way that her heart twists are her sister’s words. She wants to be happy but the idea of their happiness is a poison on her tongue and she feels nothing but bitter jealousy. “I am so glad that you are all happy,” she lies between her fanged teeth, her voice steady, the serpent girl able to hold onto her deception for this one time. “I am so glad that you found it again.”
She presses another kiss and, this time, tells a truth.
“I have missed you so much, little sister.”
When she steps back and notices the curve of her belly, Adna feels a strange combination of feelings rise up and choke her. She feels something like a vicious ache when she imagines Beth’s dark face. She feels something like sorrow. But she washes it clean. “I am,” she says and she does not have to feign how happy she is about her third child. She doesn’t have to lie about her love for her children.
“A daughter?” she questions, her heart swelling for Sabbath.
Like a good sister, she bumps her nose against that familiar scaled neck.
If she could, she would readily split her heart in two and share it with her sister so they might both be close to whole again. In many ways, though, Sabbath is still childish in her belief that things will ever be complete for them. Their loneliness is a fracture that has healed crooked. How far would they have to break in order to be made right again? Would they have to face the fire as their father did? Would Beqanna’s magic swallow them whole and crave them new bodies, stronger bodies like it did for their mother? No, fortune does not smile on them, but she can imagine that she feels the sun on her face for now.
Adna’s words are all teeth when she lies and Sabbath hears it but she says nothing. If she just loved her enough, maybe these scars could fade. If she just held her a little tighter then they could be together again. And so she does. She clings until she worries their scales may fuse into one and then she holds on a little longer. Her tears well up in her eyes but she keeps herself from crying and being so weak. The younger girl puts on a brave smile when Adna confesses that she has missed her, and this time it is truth.
(Had anyone ever said they missed her? Had anyone even felt that for her before?)
Here, it’s so easy to forget the way Eight made her into a plaything. The taste of his magic and blood, like battery acid on her tongue, feels like a bad dream in another life. There is only safety here. She exhales and her breath shakes a little before she finally pulls away to look into Adna’s eyes. Sabbath nods and laughs, returning the soft bump in a tender display of affection.
But then she asks about the father and Sabbath feels her smile wither.
“Oh.. I’m not sure. It’s not like I’m special to him or.. to anyone, really,” she says, those tears rising up and threatening to spill over this time. She forces her smile to return and she tries to swallow the knot in her throat. How could she tell Adna that her only worth to boys is her body? She isn’t clever or funny. She’s not even pretty enough for them to stay. She’s just teeth and warm blood.
“His name is Bethlehem. I don’t think he’s really from anywhere. I named her Prayer, and luckily she looks more like him than me,” she says with a laugh that tumbles crooked from her lips. She tries to smile but the expression is just pointed teeth pretending they’re happy.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
She never thought that such a simple question would come to hurt her so much.
She never thought about how it might twist into her, how it much make her vision blurry—how her breath could so quickly leave her lungs. But it does the second that she hears the name. The second that it is her sister who is saying his name. Adna swallows hard and feels reality tip underneath her.
For a second, and then two, she is just quiet as she tries to stop herself from screaming.
Finally, she forces herself to talk—the same way that she has forced herself forward after her encounter with Beth. How she had built a wall around her agony. But this time, it’s more important because the wall is not there to protect herself as much as it is there to protect her sister—to somehow keep her safe.
“You’re special to me,” she says quietly, her heart pounding in her chest. She reaches over and presses her fanged kiss to her sister’s cheek, wondering about the broken horn and the pain that must have led her sister to do it. Was she destined to only hurt those around her? Would she only hurt Sabbath more?
She forces herself to smile.
“Prayer is a beautiful name,” and she imagines a filly with his grave eyes, his dark coloring. She imagines what her own child will be like. She imagines and her throat goes dry. “Was he,” the words come out before she can stop them, before she can pull them back, and she finds that she is helpless to do anything but tumble over with them, letting her body break on the back of the rocks, “Was he special to you?”
Was he as special to her as he was to Adna?
Did she find herself staring in the shadows to find his shape?
Did she, too, know the queer way he could punch clean through a heart?
They are alike in many ways, but Sabbath does not handle pain in the way that her sister does. While the elder builds walls around her pain and keeps it safe from further harm, she prefers to rip it out. She carves new scars over the old so no one can ever say they left their mark on her. Sabbath claws at every shred of emptied hope and smothers her weeping heart until she’s sure it’s really dead this time. She has learned to make every pain her own and shape her agonies with her own two hands. Every old ache is just a new skin to shed, for her. It’s just another notch in the knife handle.
She watches Adna and searches her eyes intensely as she remains silent for a second too long. This isn’t careful thought of trying to remember someone. Sabbath is not quick with words or ideas, but she’s got the eyes of a hawk when things aren’t what they seem. But maybe Adna is onto her because her words disrupt that suspicion and flood her with something that slices through her instead. She’s numb when the kiss finds her cheek and her eyes stare off at something far from here. What was she hiding? The serpent sister watches from the corner of her eye but she wonders if maybe she shouldn’t press it.
Was he special to you?
She clenches her teeth at the question and she’s quick to shake her head no – too quick. Sabbath had uprooted all the little hopes and daydreams that night had given her and set them on fire with everything else. They never had time to take root. Still, a part of her wondered if he would ever seek them out or if he even wanted to know his daughter’s face. She blinks away tears and just keeps shaking her head no.
“If you make them special, it’s that much easier for them to crush you,” she says and her voice is magma rising up in her. “You have to be the first to leave or you wake up alone.”
The embers churn in their furnace and roar back into an all consuming flame. As much as Sabbath liked to destroy the parts of herself that she had allowed to become vulnerable, she liked to ruin others more. Their father gave her the gift of hunger and she dreamed of ripping out the throat of every boy who wouldn’t say they loved her back. She wanted to tear out their hearts that refused her and lick her lips clean of them like sticky honey on her tongue.
“When they promise you forever, you have to promise not to bite down too hard. You’re both lying, anyway.”
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Her sister’s words make her dizzy—leave her disoriented.
Did she know?
Did she somehow know?
Because she had made Beth special, and she had woken up alone. She had been the one who was crushed. She gladly lay down and let him put his heel on her throat because she didn’t know how to do anything but fall for him. She felt the columns of her heart shift the first time he had pressed his mouth to the ridges of her spine, and she didn’t know how to go on when she has been so irrevocably changed by him.
But she can’t say these things to her sister.
She can’t admit just how right she is without also admitting her unknown transgression.
So she just smiles, the gentle curve of a scarred lip sad, as she realizes the depth of her family’s sorrow. They had no right to be this sad. They had no right to drown in their own pain, but they found themselves back at the bottom of the lake again and again. No matter where they turned, they ended up here.
She opens her mouth to say something—to say anything—but nothing comes. Nothing but the sound of her sharp inhale and slow exhale, the feeling of toxins she is desperate to release into the wild. Quietly, she closes her mouth and just looks at her sister, watches her come apart, and she hates herself for the secret she is now keeping—this secret she is tucking away like she has any chance of her never knowing.
“I am so sorry, Sabbath,” she finally manages, even though she knows that her sister has no idea just how sorry she is—just what she is sorry about. “I would love to meet your daughter.”
In this life, Sabbath has learned, you are either the deer or you are the hunter.
In this life, love is just a hunting season where perfect aim is a mercy.
But then how had their parents found a way to hammer their love into something that lasted so many years? How could they each be the hunter and the prey and both come out on top? She’s spent so many nights trying to pick it apart and learn from them but her hands are always stained red in the end. Would anyone ever love their daughters enough to drag themselves over broken glass and still have enough life in them to say they loved them? She doesn’t think there was anyone waiting to find her, not like that.
Her edges are too sharp from being broken so many times. No one can get close enough to kiss her softly and she doesn’t want to learn how to let them. Those sage green eyes watch the curve of her sister’s lip but she can’t quite scratch the surface enough to make out the secrets underneath it. They’ll drown together, that much is clear, but she doesn’t know if they’re both dying inside for the same reasons. Why do her eyes flow with pity when she looks at her?
Her breathing softens and she calms, slowly but surely. “You don’t have any reason to be sorry. I’ve always known where to find you, if I needed you. I just didn’t know how badly I did,” she explains, shrugging her small shoulders. She’s quick to dismiss apologies and she’s always the girl who says “it’s fine” when people lay their sorry’s at her feet. “Prayer is in Tephra. She heals, like Mother, and she doesn’t look like us.. Not at all.”
A smile manages to find its way to her face and this time it is sincere, though weary. Sabbath knows her child will never know how the taste of someone’s blood changes when they die between your teeth. No, her daughter will put them all back together instead of breaking them apart. She smiles because her child is hardly hers at all.
one touch will make you so nervous you might stop breathing one touch will make you so reckless you might start feeling one touch will finally show to me what you can't hide
Her heart breaks with each new word that Sabbath says.
It is becoming so clear—so painfully clear—just how much she has let her sister down. How much she has failed to be there for her. She has always been so wrapped up with her own problems, so concerned with her own heartaches, that she never was there to watch out for Sabbath like a sister should.
The failure is a bitter thing on her tongue, and she has to swallow it down.
Swallow it down and let it fester because what else is there to do?
She does her best to keep it from her features and just watch her baby sister who is no longer a baby. Adna just shakes her head. “I should have been there for you,” she says, affirming her previous sentiment with another bump of her nose against her sister’s neck. “I missed you too. I needed you too,” this is a soft confession as she realizes that she had not yet said that—that her sister may not know.
When she describes Prayer, Adna feels it like a gut punch and rolls with it.
“I am sure she is as lovely as mother,” her throat is tight and she is surprised at how normal she sounds.
It takes everything within her to pull her thoughts away from her niece, from Beth’s daughter, and instead rolls her scaled shoulders. “I live in Taiga now,” she says as she thinks of Aten and of the trees that twist around one another. When she realizes that Beth lives there too, her heart begins to thunder, her head starting to hurt, and she grits her teeth. “It’s beautiful. I really like the trees,” she finishes lamely.
