[private] and you will witness what the fire can undo; straia

[weed]

They come together like tendrils of smoke, although he can feel the heat of her flames dancing along the ground beneath them, burning up near their bellies, threatening to reach for their throats. He delights in the violence underneath the whispers of it—the gentleness that gets chewed up by the need and the darkness, the way that they could never be soft with one another for long, could never lean into the sweet.

His eyes darken with something different though as she changes the world around them.

It is not the Valley he had lived in, but he had little loyalty to the place—certainly smaller loyalty than he had ever had to Straia. It was her home though; the place where he had planted that tree for her as some kind of promise that he would return. His chest tightens, just for a moment, as he takes it all in, as this new Beqanna bleeds away, and it is just the two of them in this world, this memory, of her making.

He leans down to skim his mouth over her painted neck. “Good,” he says, as if teasing her with the way that he, too, missed her. Missed the way holding her felt like pressing a knife into the neck. The way she was both life and death in these moments, as the only thing that had ever captured his attention for long.

Weed pulls back though so that he can survey the Chamber of her memory, studying the intricacies of her gift to pull it back into such stark details, every corner of it flourishing with what it had once been.

“You would not remake Beqanna into a mirror of her past,” he finally says, partially in response to the world around them and partially in response to her thoughts before. It is more statement than question.

“What would you remake her into now?”

His smile is sharp and cruel as he looks back to her, studying the elegant lines of her face.

for so long have my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary ploy