maybe we started this fire [flamevein]

[Cress]

all that we have amassed sits before us, shattered into ash

She feels like she is on fire.

Maybe she is. With the wisps of flame that pour unending from her throat, surely she must've caught flame at one point. A singed cheek; her mane burnt away; the crackling of her flesh being cooked under the heat her own body has produced. She is burnt and blackened but just from looking at her, one wouldn't be able to tell. Sure, she bears a dragon on her chest (she is trying to learn to be proud of it, for she had survived) and her lack of ears is probably startling, but her burnished copper coat gleams as brightly as it did before the Dark God claimed her as one of his. Only her head and her heart are aflame. Perhaps she should be used to it by now.

The flames spilling from her lips are a truth, though--she has decided that she is too tired of keeping the fire contained inside of her and maybe, just maybe, if she continues to let them out they might even be extinguished. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Her life is full of too many maybes and not any certainties. Nothing in her life has ever been certain... nothing. From the day she was born her life has been ever changing, shifting this way and that. She's nearly died more times than she cares to count and even her poor heart has been torn apart more than once (one time it was Cress herself who did the heart tearing, the second time it was Demian, and the third was her own mother). She is tired of maybes.

She is tired of burning, tired of fearing the flames that are as much a part of her as her healing and her empathy. She goes in search of the one other within the Valley who could possibly understand what she is feeling (but probably doesn't; he loves to set his entire body aflame whereas she shrinks from the stream of fire that pours unfettered from her throat. "Flamevein," she calls when they are but several yards away. Her voice is as charred as the rest of her, her vocal chords having been burnt away many times over--she is not quite skilled in controlling her dragon, it would seem.

"Tell me," she murmurs as she steps closer, throwing up a shield of healing as she presses her nose to his shoulder. She is not afraid of him, but she is not excited of the prospect of shoving her face into a bed of fire. "Tell me how to control the fire. Teach me to not be afraid."

cress

oxytocin x kindling

i don't know what this is