02-09-2026, 12:57 AM
Ryatah
WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU
IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU
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?”
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?”
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE
@Zohariel