together we're a perfect storm; any

[riva]

It consumes her the way a wildfire consumes a forest - hot, bright, relentless. Her bitterness does this, burns away all else in the wake of its fierce flames until she is made anew, burnt and callous. She knows that she is forever changed because of it but then, she never stood a chance against being anything but bitter - it was all she had known, was the milk of her beginning and will be the dry dust of her death, and she needed no spiderwebs to tell her that like her mother whom she spares but a brief, cruel thought towards. Riva lays all her blame for what she has become at the feet of her mother like a fresh kill, foul and bleeding - that is her heart, laid bare, stripped and raw, but not aching - she doesn’t ache for what never was, has no dreams left of becoming something else, those too were burnt up in her short youth at Lea’s side and now, Riva has grown strong on the draught of her bitterness, tough as old leather. She has learned how to fill up on hate, on loathsome things like the bat that flies in the night and feasts on the insects that glow and bite; Riva is satisfied only with the night, black like her soul feels, which could very well be an exaggeration but if there is good left in her, it is small and easily spurned because she will not suffer the same pity she endured at her grandmother’s side, watching the happy family grow swell in numbers while she fell to the wayside. They were all sunshine and smiles, and she was not - she was shadows and hate, brimming with dark revelations that she was the interloper in their family, and in the end, it made sense to her - she was not welcome there, spurned by her own family. That was more her doing then theirs’ but her dark little mind twists it to fit her bitterest hate, making her think they abandoned her because they had, blood to them was nothing when it came to Riva. She does not know why she is here of all places to be, or what she expects to come of standing amongst all the silly mares and sillier stallions. They make fools of themselves and she merely watches with a grim set of her lips, her eyes dark and unkind with thoughts of how foolish they are, and again she wonders, why here? Better here then there, the Dale and its history, and hate swells up in her breast ready to choke her until she tamps it back down with a sucked in breath and a flurry of footfalls that moves her off the brazen path so that she is less visible, more shadowed and off by herself, staring and worrying the knot of her own pain further until lay tangled and hopeless. Then again, much of this was hopeless - always had been, she just gave it chance after chance to get better in some way but it never did, but Riva is not the kind to just up and end things. No, she nurtures her long-lived hurts and feeds them the fat off her dreams of revenge. One day, she tells herself, unaware that she has whispered it aloud. One day, and it becomes a mantra repeated in her head as she stares them down and away, left alone to the misery that sharpens the edges of her, makes them knife-bright and harsh - the shadows do not flatter her, though once she could have been pretty before the bitterness thinned her out. One day, she tells herself, one day..