Yseulte cannot get away from death.
It's as if she carries it within her wherever she goes, a deadly disease laying coiled and still in her veins until it strikes, swiftly and silent as the jaws of a green-throated viper. They always die, the ones she allows herself to love. Her mother was stolen from her first—the mother she never knew, the mother her father had loved more than anything in the world. She'd always wanted one, though, a nice mother to stroke her hair and spin sweet tales with happy endings of fair princes and princesses, and then sing her to sleep at night. Zjarri's never had happy endings, you see. When Yseulte grew older and fairer with every passing day, her father would often look at her strangely, as if seeing her properly for the first time. But when she looked into his eyes, expecting to find warmth and love, only contempt was to be found.
He hated me, she realized sadly, almost as much as he loved me.
Finn was taken from her next; the sweet boy with the laughing brown eyes the color of summer walnuts and hair always tousled with some bizarre accessory of nature: autumn leaves, melting snow, morning dew. Her only childhood friend. When Zjarri took her away from her family of wild warrior women and stole across the scorched sands of the desert to a place full of green and growth and life, in the hottest hour of the day, she and Finn would lie on the moist banks, watching the minnows dart and nibble at their dangling hooves. But death was never far behind; always lingering with pale skin and bright blue eyes and hair that curled with fire, and Finn's death opened her eyes to the world, to her father's cruelty.
Even now, after all these years, she could still feel her father's sweet breath flowering on her skin—so cold it burned. Her father took Finn from her, and so she took life from her father, so that he might know what it was like.
He was not always bad.
But the good did not outweigh the bad.
He hurt people. He hurt many people.
She could not forgive him for that, or herself, for the terrible thing she was about to do.
At the time, she did not know if a demigod could die. She did not know if he was, in fact, a demigod. The son of the Fire Lord and his Firebird, the whispers said. Once, she dared ask him. His terrible silence and clenched jaw was more terrifying than his usual outbursts of anger, and she never asked again. They say the children of the gods bleed golden blood. Did you, Father? Did you bleed gold as you burned? She didn't know a lot of things, back then, but those gods were dead and gone, in a world half the galaxy away where magic thrived in every living being (except yourself, you idiot girl), and whatever blood ran through her father's veins may as well have been gasoline, for all the good it did him.
I loved him, and he burned.
He burned because I loved him.
That is what she tells herself, even to this day. And now, Torasin, the one friend she allowed herself since the days of Finn, was gone. Murdered, ironically enough. How could she despise and curse and loath the murderer, when she was one herself? Perhaps she ought to find him, this mysterious murderer. Instead of murdering him for murdering Torasin, as her father had once murdered her friend, and as Yseulte in turn had murdered her own father, perhaps, just perhaps, she would spare him for murdering her friend. Would that break this terrible cycle she had brought upon herself? Perhaps they could even go murdering together, she and this mysterious friend-murderer. Or maybe they could even be friends, and they wouldn't have to murder anybody.
A strangled laugh escaped her, a pitiful, wounded sound that choked in her throat.
I think I'm going crazy. If I know I'm crazy, does that make me sane? Oh, why did you have to leave so soon, my summer-eyed friend?
She had slipped across the Edge borders early that morning, despite the recent orders from the DragonHeart herself that World Edge citizens were not allowed to leave the borders without an escort. So naturally, Yseulte had gone anyway, without an escort. Nasty murdering murderers on the loose, so Aaron and Lace and all of the other crafters were all being busy little bees, building a massive wall, to keep all of the murderers out. "But who will keep me out?" she asked Itzal, sighing, swallowing her grief, and staring deep into the abyss atop the Heavenly Fields.
Itzal, wise little tiger that he was, was clearly avoiding her in this tragic, windswept state. He crouched in the snow sullenly, staring at her contemptuously with large, unblinking venomous eyes colored an electric shade of violet—the color of the violets her father once thawed with his breath for her in the dead of winter. If he were here, he could thaw all of these dead flowers. They lay scattered around her, frozen in gruesome, twisted forms.
"Did you know," she mused aloud to her small companion, her voice lazy and dark, "that I found you here, little tiger? I'm crippled, now. I thought you would be worth it, though, you'd be the answer to all of my problems—my loneliness, my anger, my guilt. I thought you were the cure, Itzal." She turned back to the edge, watching the snow fall in violent flurries. "I was wrong." Her hind leg ached just thinking of that cold wintry day nearly a year past, and she could still taste the foul stench of fear on her tongue and feel the teeth rendering the flesh from her leg.
"You'd like to push me off this cliff, wouldn't you? Yes, of course, you would like that," she said softly, feeling his cold eyes still fixed on her back. Almost as much as I'd like to boot you off it myself. At once, she was ashamed. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. Itzal was supposed to love her, not despise her. But it didn't matter. She didn't need him. She didn't need Torasin, Lace, her King of Thieves, or World's Edge.
I don't need anybody.
At first, she couldn't discern the sound of feathers from the gentle hush of falling snow. It was Itzal's haughty snarl that caused her to automatically look to the sky. The sight made her breath catch in her throat like a sparrow with frozen wings. Surely it could not be? Why would a god visit her, of all of Helovia's citizens? She was a nobody. A destroyer playing at being a crafter, perhaps, an outcast pretending to share a home with family, a murderer masquerading as a damsel in distress, but aside from that? Her life was not particularly a picture of greatness. All she had for company was a silly little tiger and her useless beauty.
But Father Earth had been kind despite knowing the blackness of her heart and the dark deeds that tainted it such a color—he had listened patiently, and a small smile had bloomed on his lips like a rose. He even granted her selfish mortal desires. And for naught, it seemed. But she would thank him anyway for courtesy's sake, she decided absentmindedly as the powerful figure landed amid the skeletons of dead flowers, even though the God would surely know the bitterness in her heart.
But it wasn't the Earth Lord come to visit a mere murdering mortal and her pathetic kitten of a tiger.
It was a boy.
Half-way between boy and man, he possessed all the strength and power of someone much older than himself, and yet, something about the winged boy still lingered in the wild-eyed innocence of childhood. Vulnerability, she decided. She remembered those days quite vividly—torn between following your own heart and following the wishes of those you love best.
"I thought I knew you," she said bluntly, unable to decide if she was relieved or disappointed. "I'm having a pity party, you see. Would a strapping young lad such as yourself care to humor a crazy old lady and her kitten?" She smiled to herself as Itzal growled from beneath a ledge he sheltered under; his eyes two luminous bulbs of malevolent lavender. She then peered closely at the winged boy's expression, unable to discern the emotions lingering in the gentle hollows of his young face, but ultimately decided he must be having a tragic day as well. "Gods, you look like him," she murmured, more to herself than to the boy. She'd heard tales of the gods laying with mortals—after all, it's a story she once believed about her own father. She laughed bitterly to herself.
Gods, demigods, and murderers.
A circle that never ended, it seemed.
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