Eilidh feels the hot trickle of blood as a place on her hip she’s pushed into the hawthorne splits open and a rivulet begins down the side of her flank. The stranger tells her that her name is lovely, and for that Eilidh smiles again in spite of her aching body. “Thank you,” she answers, closing her parted lips before more can escape out of her from across her tongue and through her teeth. She doesn’t want to tell her its meaning — not here, not like this; not skin and bones and thorns with an insatiable thirst for mercy.
A light in the darkness, she would have said in another time, her chest puffed out with pride in Moselle’s unwavering optimism. Eilidh had always been so proud of her; her kindness, and her thoughtfulness had been unmatched. She’d always wanted to become something her mother would be proud of, too. Is it shame then that is gnawing now at the soft flesh of Eilidh’s belly, twisting her guts until she’s sick — or is it only disease?
Perhaps, like Ryatah, that’s what this is: her own destruction.
Perhaps that’s why she leans her hips into the thorns and doesn’t think to move. It’s a choice. It’s one small thing she has some say over when everything else has been decided for her. Maybe it’s not about loyalties (to Moselle, to the mound of earth that houses her bones) at all. Maybe it never was. Maybe it was one frightened orphan who had clung to the only sense of control that she ever could. All this time she had thought she’d been fearless, that she had carried on in spite of the havoc her beginnings had been.
But what if that was wrong?
Ryatah gives her a name then, one that she repeats softly aloud as she was accustomed to, tasting each syllable across her tongue. In these moments they are both echoing a previous one, though neither of them knows it.
“It’s lovely to meet you,” Eilidh says, not unkindly. It is lovely, even if they’re both dying, even if they’re both only shadows of who they had been before.
“Do you think Beqanna will survive this?” She asks, a small cough racking her little body with a wince to follow each heave as her insides throb.
It is too late for them, surely, but maybe not the world.
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Ryatah] Sorry this one is Not Good
