"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
The continent he'd made his home as a boy, not much older than a yearling, is a distant memory. Hyaline, its lake, the heady scent of wisteria... Ciri. Jah-Lilah. Takhar. Masuda. Bayek. Memories of them feel like a fever dream. Tangerine, Castile, Eione, Makhai - those memories, even more surreal.
Even Iset and Sakir, his own siblings, rarely cross his mind. When had he seen them last? Just after Hyaline had been razed with flame?
Could he even recognize them anymore? Was any of it real?
He returns, much the same and yet perhaps not. His golden scales still glimmer in the autumn sun, his mahogany eyes still sharp. Upon his shoulders rest draconic wings he does not quite remember carrying the last time he'd walked Beqanna, but the weight of them is comfortable enough. They fold to his sides and the leather of them is softer than expected as they brush his plated barrel.
He stands in the very center of what he had always known to be the Meadow, but something feels very different. It's not in the scenery - the grasses still seem endless, the sky still a dazzling blue. It's early in the season and the warmth of summer has carried into the beginnings of autumn but there is stll that scent of fall that lingers in the crispness of the air.
If not in the scenery, it must be the air. There's a saltiness in it that wasn't there before, as if the sea is closer than what he is used to. It reminds him of Tephra, Nerine, those places along the coast that are weather-worn and sea-swept.
It's the horses, too, who pass by. All of them unfamiliar. He searches their faces, simultaneously hoping and dreading that someone he recognizes will happen to meander through. But he had been gone for so long, had spent a lifetime away.
He'd done it before - he could recreate himself again.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
It had been such a strange dream.
A stallion the color of slate, stars in his red eyes, galaxies caressing his body with an intimacy that had made her both envious and amorous all at once. Loneliness, she blames these long years encased in ice and chosen solitude as the reason behind this dream, this otherworldly stallion who simply appeared and had looked at her. ”You are so much more than your stars.” He had whispered (that sharp gaze flicking to the red flickering around her with amusement) and she had shivered, being certain she had heard those words before as well as that curl at the corner of his lip, and yet she didn’t flee or fight. Instead, she leaned into the dream… Into him. He was neither kind nor cruel, he simply was. And so was she. Past, present, future. It all seemed so simple in this dream space.
There had been no sweet nothings whispered in her curved ear, no tender caress of goodbye. In the dream, he had looked at her after with a coy expression sparkling in endless red and promised a surprise. ”I wonder if you’ll like it.” That smile… Something about that smile. And then he was gone.
She had woken up in the Meadow and had been confused on how she had gotten there. Since her return to the Isle, she hadn’t left. There was no reason to go anywhere else, nobody she wanted to see, no adventure running restless circles in her gut. Unaware that Gale had been blown to smithereens and that her revenge had been firmly stolen from her, she had simply been waiting. Time had begun to heal her body from what it had endured in the ice. The invisible wounds that lingered in her soul, around her beaten heart, in the space where she could still feel phantom lightning pressing against that ruby red anger that heats the stars around her… All the time in the world couldn’t seem to mend any of it.
In the foggy haze between sleep and reality, she thinks of the vivid images her mind had conjured and absentmindedly reaches out to touch a long neglected part of herself, the one she has to the stars and the little magic she could wield. What she hadn’t accessed in a very long time. There is still a sense of wrongness, an inky stain blotting out what she knows she should feel. With another shudder, she rises to her hooves and shakes away the remaining sleep that plagues her (as well as the rising feeling of foreboding as she recalls the dream stallion’s last words).
Her starlit wings stretch and fall into their usual protective stance, brushing against the slightly swollen sides of her belly as they settle, and she makes her way towards the nearest small creek. For so long she hadn’t held much of an appetite but today, for some reason, she is famished. Breakfast is the only thing on her mind until she catches a glint of gold. How many times has she done this, thinking she has seen someone familiar out of the corner of her silver spinning eye, and been wrong. There is no point in looking when she’s been incorrect every single time.
Old habits are hard to break and so she looks. Looks and lets the wind steal her breath as her step falters and her mind blanks outs. Despite the wings, she would know his face anywhere. All she can do is stare at him. How long had she thought of this moment and everything she would say or hold him accountable for. Except all those well planned speeches and words have disappeared, retreating further and further away as her mind tries to catch up with the rest of her. Her wings flare at her sides before wrapping around her body as if they might protect her from him, hiding the more recent scars that mar her chest and speak to exactly what had been happening in the long years apart.
Amet remains in the heart of the Meadow for so long, unsure of whether to roam familiar routes of the past or stay in place to get his bearings. His inaction helps with the latter - and truth be told, the idea of facing Hyaline after a lifetime away fills him with such an uncomfortable combination of emotions that he tries to avoid the thought altogether. The windswept grasses of the early autumn keep him company as he stands and grows accustomed to the feel of it against the leather of his folded wings. The occasional horse passes by, some meandering and some in quite the hurry, but by this point he has given up trying to search their faces for something familiar. He simply remains, breathing it all in.
Until his unfocused chocolate eyes register a smokey black shape forming just at the periphery of his vision. He thinks for half a second that it’s nothing, that it’s another unfamiliar traveler passing by, but there is nothing he can do to stop his curiosity from flicking his gaze in the direction of the movement.
Amet’s sepia eyes are met with silver ones.
Those silver eyes.
His breath stops in his throat and his eyes refuse to blink, afraid that taking his gaze off the woman before him for even a millisecond will cause her to disappear. He is flooded all at once with too much: too much shame, too much love, too much sorrow, too much fear. They had not met their end amicably, relishing in the privilege of being a couple who’d realized their love had run its course. No, there had been pain.
She had caused some but he – undoubtedly, he had caused more.
When she moves her wings to cradle herself, his bated breath finally expels as if he’d been punched in the chest. But he does not move otherwise, afraid to scare her away. Afraid that, despite the palpable tension that flows over the Meadow’s grasses, that she may be part of a fever dream.
He has spent a lifetime away.
“Ciri…” Amet finally whispers, his tone overflowing with all things hopeful and warm and sorrowful, surprised to find his voice works regardless of the way they scrape against his dry mouth. “Ciri,” he repeats a second time in disbelief of the name that falls from his lips after he’d been certain, so certain, he would never utter it again.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
This is either a dream or a nightmare.
He spots her the same time she spots him and the shock on both their faces are mirror images, unbelieving. A range of emotions seem to move all at once across the golden scales of his face and in the back of her head she wonders what he finds in hers.
Regret, confusion, curiosity, sadness, a wild unbridled joy. Anger?
Ah yes, her new persistent familiar. That was certainly there too, always there, and rising quickly to simmer along her war-torn skin.
Because the love hadn’t run its course and that was what had made it all the more tragic to begin with. She had been so young, they had both been so young, and inexperienced with what love truly was. Even now, she doesn’t think she truly understands it and had come to the point where it must not be meant for her. Perhaps stars could never understand such a complex thing or perhaps, as she had always thought, stars loved a little too much and found it hard to settle or land in just one spot.
It had been one of the reasons why she had admired Jah-Lilah so much and had wondered how she had made it look so easy, to share her heart with the consent of the others she was sharing it with. When she had found herself in a similar struggle, it hadn’t been easy at all. It had devastated her, wrecked her, and she had come out far more broken then she had ever been when she had washed up on the lake from the Underneath.
So how come, after all this time, her heart flutters painfully in her chest just as it had the last time she had seen him? That day is still clear as a bell, ringing in her head. Pregnant and terrified, heartsick, and weary to the bone. She remembers the way her voice had been hoarse and dry from screaming at him, how she had wanted to cry but the tears had been shedding for months and she couldn’t find them anymore.
She could understand the reasons of why he had been hurt and even why he wouldn’t want to be with her when she had voiced her truth, regardless if she didn’t agree or even like it. She could even admit that they both could have handled the whole situation better, differently. She hadn’t known then what she knew now. That she couldn't stop being simply what she was, that she no longer would hold guilt or shame herself for. She was done apologizing for what she was. What had happened with Castile was inevitable and if Castile had been a mare, she would have been drawn to her in the same way. Stars care nothing for genders, they only see what’s in your heart.
Ciri had grown up in a muted world after losing her memories of her time in the heavens. She had struggled to find connections in others and once she finally did, it was hard to deny any connection once it brushed against her own uncertain heart.
For Amet, though, she might have tried. Tried to anchor herself to him because what she had shared with the former dragon-king had nearly destroyed her when she had found herself without it. For him, she might have willingly placed herself in the cage until her stars died out. However, she was something of time and space. There had been other plans for her.
All these memories pass through her mind in a blink of a frantically spinning silver eye. The red stars that hover around her darken in anticipation, her downy midnight wings glitter with starlight where they wrap around her. It can’t be him. It just can’t.
Her name, sorrowed and whispered, reaches her through the distance between them and her lashes flutter closed, suddenly unable to breathe. Unable to look at him. “Please..” She whispers back, that rage inside of her starting to rebuild as she frantically searches her mind for an explanation and lands on the only one that could make sense. Her name again and she can feel herself start to shatter in the little inner healing she had done. “Gale, please.” She says more fiercely, her throat constricted with emotion as she keeps her eyes firmly shut. “Anything but his face.”
There has never been any doubt in Amet’s mind that his love for Ciri was unmatched, incomparable to anything else he had ever felt in his lifetime. Even in the hazy years he’d spent away from Beqanna, living a life that felt more like someone else’s than his own, there had only ever been placeholders. He just hadn’t thought of them that way until now ─ with Ciri before him, those same swirling silver eyes. That same anger that sets them ablaze. He had cared for them (Eione, Jah-Lilah). Had loved them, even. But there is no doubt.
He doesn’t dare to break the connection between his sepia eyes and her gunmetal ones, but in his peripherals he can see the white scar that cuts across her face and the others that dot what areas of her chest he can see beyond her feathered starlight wings. He remembers her scars, could trace them with the softness of his muzzle in his sleep, but not these. There are more now. Too many. And despite what had torn the two of them apart, the actions and distance and years, there is an instinctual rage that curls in Amet’s stomach at whoever ─ or whatever ─ could have brought the star-wielder harm.
He repeats her name in that gruff whisper and he loses the gift of those silvered eyes. She hides them beneath tight eyelids and he nearly panics, assaulted with the fear that he may never see them again. How strange, to live without someone for so long and to survive ─ only to feel that death may be on the doorstep or around the next corner should they disappear once more. He wills himself to breathe, his armored chest heaving, as she speaks her plea ─ that singular word nearly begging him to leave. Amet is confronted with the urge to move closer, to comfort her, but his long golden legs are caught in the sand as if it is cement, hardened against his desire to reach her.
He shouldn’t infringe on her space anyway, he knows, but to see the pain in the way Ciri holds herself breaks his heart all over again.
His mouth opens again in an attempt to find the right words, but to what end? He is not prepared to talk about their past, to dig up words and actions he had spent so long burying. But there is no way to offer the star-wielder comfort if those things that hold them back are not resolved.
Gale, the emotion spilling over in her voice, and Amet’s own inner turmoil is silenced immediately. “Gale?” The question is raspy, held back by the tightness of his throat, but loud enough for her to hear regardless. Could she truly be mistaking him for someone else, calling him by the name of a lover she’d grown close to after their own ruptured ending? Anything but his face.
It takes him a moment, but finally he realizes that she thinks he is a glamored version of himself, his face on somebody else’s body. As if he is a weapon to be used against her. His frown deepens against the draconic lines of his face and he shakes his head at her pleas. “It’s me, Ciri.” He yearns to call her akmar just as he had done all those years ago, to help her realize ─ but the sentiment behind it, the memory of their shattered love, is too painful to use as proof of his existence.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
Shining brilliance. It’s what he use to call her in the language of his old home and people. Akmar. She had never forgotten the nickname or the title she had once held. The Heart of Hyaline. It was so laughable now. She barely had a heart anymore thanks to the Curse. And despite the shimmer of starlight around her wings and the heavy crimson stars that hang around her like furious guardians, she can’t remember the last time she had felt any type of brilliance about her. She had never been further from her stars, something she had thought impossible since the Eclipse.
When had her shine started to dull? It had happened long before the situation of Gale, before she had died and learned that the heavens had rejected her. No… It had started in that other world. Eternal. When she had found her son… And Jah. Of course it had made sense, for the mare who had been a mother figure to her (to them) to step up and raise the child that she had been separated from. And yet, she hadn’t felt relief or even gratitude when she had found them. It was something in the red wytch’s stance, the way she looked at her. Something had changed and in an instant an invisible line in the sand seemed to have been drawn between them.
If only she knew how right she had been in trusting her gut feeling about her.
He denies he is the Cursed thing who has become the entire reason of her existence these days. For a moment she holds her breath, waiting for that old name to make her crumble and she only releases it when he does not. Slowly, dark lashes reveal the storming silver once more and she finds herself uncertain of what to say. What to do. She can’t find it in her to close the distance between them just as she can’t make up her mind to leave.
She should. She should leave because nothing good can come from this. That foreboding feeling lingers and intensifies, had this been the gift the gray stallion with red eyes had promised in the dream? No… She doesn’t think it is. Slowly, carefully, she lowers the wings that cradled her. The angry lines all over her chest where Gale had opened her up to take or hide what he wished, the many scars across her forelimbs that told the tale of where each bone had protruded and bled. The small swell to her thin body where the gift Carnage had left her lay, undisturbed and unnoticed for now.
She hadn’t been able to meet his eye when she had reopened her own, instead she had glanced down as her wings began to move until they were flared upwards at her sides and finally she looks at him. The silver of her eyes hiding her pupils as the shock begins to wear off and the fury reappears. She finally holds her head defiantly as the red stars around her pulse with light.
The Thane of the North bares her white teeth at the man she had once (still) loved. Inside, she feels those phantom lightning strikes and the ragged remains of her heart frantically try to escape the black cloud of rage. They fail. “Where is my son?” She asks with eerie calmness and starts to advance towards him, her wings still outstretched and intention clearly written across her face. Gale had killed her, killed whatever hope for life she had left, but her destruction had truly started with the handsome gilded stallion before her. She knew what it was like to love a dragon, what would murdering one feel like?
When Amet had realized the smokey black mare standing before him in the meadow was Ciri, everything else had fallen away. The wildlife, the meadow, the distant trees, the sky that slowly turned blue as the morning continued to progress. Only Ciri has stood in crystal-clear focus since the very moment they’d connected eyes again after all of those years. Even her crimson stars, hovering around her winged frame like ambient protectors, had gone unnoticed until now. They start to throb with new intensity as he offers reassurance that he is not Gale, whoever that may be. Gale, who she is fearful of. Gale, who could fashion himself a face of Ciri’s past. Gale, who had caused her enough harm that she recoils to protect herself behind dark feathered wings until the moment she knows that he is not a source of her fear, but instead, a source of her rage.
Those crimson stars gleam with the power of the heavens as Ciri lowers her wings, removing that protective barrier from between them to reveal the history of pain that sits written upon her skin. Were it not for the anger that ignites her swirling silver eyes, Amet would have gasped at the fine white scars that cut across nearly every part of her. She had suffered since they had last crossed paths - both by him, and by something much more omnipotent. But it’s the rage and how swiftly it grows that keeps the golden stallion’s attention. It’s in the flare of her eyes and the tension in her muscles, the set of her jaw and the starlit wings that fan out to encompass the majority of his field of vision. Amet does not move, though his muscles instinctively steel himself against whatever is to come.
Where is my son?
In the midst of her anger, a vague thought interrupts Amet’s thoughts. As if he’s forgotten something. Something important. Something related to Takhar? Unlikely. But he still cannot place it - even as he finds his words again, his sharp-lined face remains pensive. “Traveling, the last I knew.” Amet does not doubt that his answer will not be enough for Ciri, but the beautiful boy they had created together has been his own man for years. A wandering one, at that.
He had taken after Jah-Lilah in that way.
The scarred woman, his former lover, stalks closer and he wonders, disconnected, what he will do if she decides to deal with her anger through violence. Though the remorse he feels for the actions of his youth remains, he wonders if his instinct will be to allow her to cause that physical pain, or if it will be to fight.
A lifetime spent away. He no longer knows himself.
And then that elusive thought clicks, the one that had been fluttering just at the edges of his mind - the ability he’d possessed only in Beqanna. He feels it unfurl in the back of his mind, his nihilism, but he hesitates.
Could he bring himself to use it on Ciri, on the woman who’d fought herself through death time and time again? On the woman he had loved, still loves, more than anything?
“Ciri,” his voice soft and low, “What answers do you need?” How can we both find closure?
Aren’t you tired, so tired, of feeling this anger?
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
Through the flames of her unrelenting anger, she stalks towards the golden stallion that had once been her entire world. Such a strong thing to admit for someone of time and space. She can see the ripple of movement beneath those bronze scales and a dark laugh slips from her mouth as she strides closer, the stars that surround her twinkling in time with the noise. It had been such a long time since anyone had been scared of her, feared her, she had forgotten what it felt like. She had been prey for so long and her anger flickers and fades, just for a second. Enough to make her halt right in front of him instead of throwing herself at him as she had previously intended.
It doesn’t last. Nothing ever lasts since that rage had found a home in her chest. Not since Gale had eaten her stars, fouled her connection to the heavens. Not since she had died and that trauma wove itself into the very fiber of her being, an ordeal she still cannot bring herself to face. There had always been a tremor of darkness in her, what made her able to battle monsters. Why, deep down, this fight with Gale she longs for as much as she fears it.
It’s what helps her face Amet now, the frantic spiraling of her silver eyes looking up into the tall stallions familiar face. Familiar... And yet a stranger. There is a longing to simply bury herself into his warm scales as if the centuries had never happened but the trembling across her body comes from the internal fight that’s straining against her torn chest. The one that wants to destroy him in every single way she’s been torn down. Perhaps he too can be rebuilt as she had, the Dark Star.
”Traveling.” He says and it’s said so nonchalant, a father who knows his son’s movements because of their bond… The one she doesn’t have. She had tried to build one when she had found him only to have herself snatched from that world too. And then there was Jah-Lilah who had shocked her with the way she had stood in her way. There is a brief flash of bright grief against the steel of her gaze, disappearing as quickly as it came as the emotion is fed to the fuel of her anger. Stoking that fire which appears on the curled corner of her snarling lips.
“I found him you know.” She says in that soft eeriness, looking up at him with her wings still arching up behind her. Not realizing that a faint light was beginning to emit from her many, many scars. “In that other world. Eternal. Him…. And Jah.” What answers did she need? For a moment she simply stares at him. “Was it you? Was it you that told her to keep him from me? Or did she come up with that plan herself?”
Suddenly answers don’t seem that important anymore. It had been a few days since she had ran into that stallion Kestrell who had managed to somehow get under her savaged skin. Since she had flown to the Mountain and been met by the fairy who had simply told her “Well Done” and vanished. She hadn’t felt any different, nothing had changed. It wasn’t possible for her to get any angrier than she already was. She had accepted that she would never heal. Now, with him here before her willingly wanting to talk to her… She realized that she truly had nothing left to lose anymore.
She realizes that even though she had been brought back to life, she could no longer live.
The connection to her shield still feels wrong but for the first time in years, she opens it. It doesn’t matter that the sun is rising behind her, she forces it just as she had the last time she had used it. Thick oily shadows are intertwined with the galaxies and burning stars that build around her, builds around them, as she grits her teeth and forces the magic to work. Sweat already builds beneath her windswept mane, the light coming from her scars beginning to grow stronger, and her gaze never wavers from his as she sneers at him. As she traps him in her black hole and keeps all others out. It doesn’t occur to her that she had never been able to do this before, her mind is everywhere and nowhere. Her heart is darkness. She sees only the red of her stars.
Will he fight her? Worse, would he smother her? He had never done it before but with a thrill of anticipation she hopes he will. To give her that final push into doing something she could never come back from. Phantom lightning strikes in her chest when she launches at him with teeth and hooves, attempting to strike his unguarded shoulder before dancing away. She refuses to turn her back to him and circles around him with an angry hiss. “Do you know what it’s like to die Amet?” She sings to him and her voice sounds strange, blackness creeping into her heart, body, and soul. “I do.” She whispers just as she launches at him again. It seemed only fair, that it was his turn.
Something else stirs behind the white-hot coals of fury, something that begins to pulse alongside the frantic rhythm of her bewildered heart. Something that begins to work through the black slickness of her shield, something that keeps pushing light through her scars. An unnatural brightness that reaches from the other side of her connection and begins to push the darkness back.
Amet thought he had seen every version of Ciri there was to see. Broken, fierce, relentless, loving, protective, doting, enraged, fearful. He was wrong. This Ciri is a new one. The anger in her argent eyes is different, because it’s not just anger. It’s vindication and amusement and the firm belief that no matter the power of her wrath, it is justified. This is the first Ciri that Amet has truly feared, the cold tendrils of it seeping between his leather scales as she continues closer.
With her wings poised away from her body, it’s easy to see the scars begin to glow. The ethereal light grows swiftly as it emanates from her smokey black frame just as the red stars quicken in their revolutions around the pair; instinctively, Amet pulls his wings closer to his sides. The fleeting thought of his nihilism passes. It remains unused.
I found him, you know. Her voice is dangerously soft, contemplative. Amet can’t help the way his lips break into a small smile. “He told me,” the golden stallion responds in kind, though there’s a softness to the edges of his words that is not there in Ciri’s. Takhar, despite his initial hesitations, had been excited at the appearance of his mother. Amet remembers the conversation well. Ciri’s inquiry, in that same tone, feels like a slap across the face. His small smile gives way, a disappointed frown left behind. “I always wanted him to have his mother. Jah grew protective of him - I can only imagine she did what she felt was right. She didn’t want him to be hurt, or for his younger siblings to see him hurt.” Jah-Lilah had loved Takhar just like her own - their own. Masuda, Bayek. In the years the young panther-shifter had not had the maternal support of Ciri, Takhar had been lucky for the presence of the mystic woman. “I had always wanted for him to grow up with you.”
But it doesn’t matter now. Their son is grown and no matter what words spill from his mouth, Amet knows that Ciri’s anger will not fade that easily. She needs to feel it, and to make him feel it.
All around them, the evidence of her magic has continued to grow and grow. The scars that sluice her skin glow so brightly now, but it’s the universe that surrounds them that leaves Amet breathless with fear. Stars, galaxies, things he was never supposed to see from the safety of the hard earth encircle them. She is in her element - powerful, unforgiving, volatile. It’s the most beautiful he has ever seen her. She lunges at him suddenly, all hooves and teeth, and Amet takes the collision with a loud grunt. His lips curl back, away from blunted teeth, but he cannot bring himself to retaliate.
A lifetime away and the first time they touch in all of those years, it’s borne of violence.
Do you know what it’s like to die, Amet?
Her question imprints in his brain, something he will never forget. Not the tone, nor the inflection, or the look in her silver eyes. The way she sings it will reverberate in his mind forever, and in that instant he mourns what they used to be. He mourns the Amet and Ciri who’d hid themselves in their wisteria hovel just for the pleasure of each other’s company. How far they had come, how far they had fallen.
I do, she whispers as she lunges again and this time Amet pivots to the side, his wing thrown open in an attempt to keep her back. He hadn’t expected her to bridge the gap between them when she holds all of the power in the universe around him now. Even if he’d wanted to, Amet knows that his nihilism could not save him in the face of This Ciri’s fury.
“Do it, Ciri. If you think it will take away your pain, do it.”
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
all of time and space, everywhere and anywhere, every star that ever was
Perhaps he had intended his words to soothe but they land sharp. Quite the opposite of what he had intended.
”Younger siblings.” She is deathly still. Deathly quiet.
“What have you done? The anger is there, simmering, but it is raw pain etched across her slashed face. ”What do you mean younger siblings?” Hurt in those silver threads tinged green with jealousy. It’s a blow that had been unintentional on his part, and irritation is quick to rise when she sees him trying to soften himself against her razor edges, which only makes it worse. It’s more than the thought of him with another, something she had done (or tried) as well.
She had never had another child. She had never tried to replace what had been lost, what had been taken from her. But he had. He had truly moved on, in every sense of the word.
She stares at him and realizes that he truly is a stranger to her now. He has loved others, had children with others… And now he is standing here looking at her as if he might still have a claim to her. As if she hadn't suffered in a lonely miserable life constantly punishing herself for what had happened between them. She looks at him and it clicks, that he had been fine. He had been fine.
He looks at her as if there were no consequences for his actions.
She decides to give him some.
Her dark laughter swirls around them when he grunts and stumbles, satisfaction in her snarl as the crimson of her stars turn the bloodiest they have ever been. It’s not enough. Not until he is bleeding on the ground like she had. Not until he truly feels pain will it be enough and even then she will want more. If she can’t have her revenge against Gale then this will have to suffice.
He begins to lament for all they had been but she… She’s done mourning. How fitting that he’s once again late to a party that she’s already leaving.
“What do you know of pain.” She mockingly scoffs at him and the shield around her begins to shift into something even darker as the brightness behind it (inside her) tries to break through. Out of the corner of her eye, she catches the white shining brilliance that’s filtering through the puckered parts of her skin and the laugh she gives now is one of irony. The residue the Curse had left behind runs rampant amongst her stars, around her starlit wings, around her shield.
“Funny how you placed so much blame on me, about not being good enough.” She says, a cruel mimic behind his wing as her teeth snap at the leathery flesh in her face. Her body pushes against it, hoping to hear a satisfying crack of bones. She knows exactly where to press too, thanks to the way Cursed Gale had once broken her own. Behind him a hole begins to open as the black storm inside of her merges with the tainted connection to the stars. ”There is no taking away this pain.” She admits and when she lunges at him again, her eyes are no longer silver but the color of the black hole behind him.
