Any hope she had felt blossoming in her chest had faded long ago. Too many days passed and the blue still clung to her skin like a rash she could not heal. And that was strange, because Malis had eventually discovered she could heal almost anything. There had been a day, a strange day, the kind of day where the world could not recover and everything remained just a little more wrong than before. Erebor had tried to burn away the blue, and oh how she had hoped it would work. But as the hair turned dark and curled and reduced to little more than soot on skin that bubbled and blistered, underneath there was still only blue. Just blue. And as soon as he had stopped and her whimpering had quieted, the blue knit itself back together and fur filled the empty places. It was like nothing had ever happened.
But the trouble with regeneration, with recklessness without consequence, was the shadow Malis could feel growing in her chest. It was like a feral beast filling her mind with terrible thoughts, bleeding a darkness into her veins that she was aching to surrender to.
She had never wanted to die until the choice had been taken from her.
There is a cold fire burning in her blue and black face as she drifts through the meadow, a face crowned in horns like glittering obsidian. She has no reason to be here, no desire for friends or finding family, no desire to form ties of any kind. She knows she is like her father, built to ruin, designed to destroy and the spark of who she used to be, that brown and white girl playing in the jungle, it begs her not to touch anyone with her families poison.
But she is selfish, just as they all are, and as soon as she sees him she is edging through the currents of bodies until they are nose to nose and she is spending seconds retracing every detail she had forgotten about such a sad, dark face.
And then, in a voice that is far too soft for a face that seems so swallowed with doubt and shadow and aching regret-
“Do you remember me?”
MALIS
makai x oksana