Her legs walk without her permission like a machine's.

There is a narrow space, a crevice, a sealed room tucked within the maze of her subconscious in which she stows her pain. She can feel it, nearly touch it, as if it were an existing, tangible thing, but she does not go near it in fear of placing a key into the lock, for there is a part of her that yearns to set its contents free, to reach out into the emptiness and pull back the other half that forever grieves as if her world has died. The dominate part, the part that you see, is hardly a part at all but a foreign mask, intricate and strong and smooth and imortal, the layers and layers of chalky white wall that sits between her room and the wide wicked windows that dance with the movement of curious glances and covetous hands and noses smearing sweat along their wine-lacquered skeletons, and how she adores to play in this worn and sun-bleached face as if she does not know that it is ugly. She sees the chipping paint and fickle color of this room only when she remembers her son; it is he who holds the key between his fingers, and he who sneers with a blaming tongue as it is turned within the embrace of a mechanical chamber.

He has turned it now, for she remembers, and her body falls into darkness.

Her body had sliced through the ivory flatness of winter that lies behind her despite the very summer sun that shone in southern elsewheres, and though her skin had tingled and prickled with the movement of life beneath it, her eyes were lackluster and danced not for the beauty of the lands they devoured as they should have; as they would have if it were a soul intact there behind their autumn lights, the gossamer shell that framed them. She had wandered for the sake of wandering, of discovery, and she ceased only then that there was something looking, only then that she watched from hollow sockets her own hollow-socketed reflection in this wall of ice, for it was an arch of a lip of a cave that ice adorned, and it was this that had so obstructed her view of hollow-socketed nothingness, and she tilted her head so deeply to the side as she studied and was studied by what the frozen crescent hid, and saw her neat and chiseled face warp into the softness of Zelos's; into her child's, for he was all and everything that had once sculpted the lines of her.

She is absent, now.

Her shoulders quiver as if she in fear and her lips twist into awful knots as she assembles the rusty images of her boy in her head so that she may see him smiling again, but he does not smile, for in the few and broken beats of life that he was alive he had naught the time, and her ears and cheeks and breast sting with his despair. She sees his death as it was never meant to be seen and her heart lurches against its tethers and she hears a desperate rapping between her bones, beneath her skin, slipping into her birdcage chest with an echo like an angry sea's churning, and there, right there, in a place that binds her spine to nothingness, to the darkness pooling in the fleshen dips above discs and chords and the oblivion that marks her back with tattoo-kisses that scar like poison, there is a piece of something alive, something beautiful, something touching her insides with golden feathers as it flutters, and she watches with screaming eyes as it ceases to be and turns to ashes at the floor of her, at the end where she once began, and her legs walk without her permission like a machine's.

It is not often that she allows these pieces to die, for it is not often that she ventures far enough to find this room, but she does find it, and after she does, after her lungs do not ache and the ties to her vile woman's nerves have severed themselves, she appears the same as she had when the piece still breathed; an unquenchable carcass with a soldier's thirst, the near-man with the iron skin, a would-be, a halfling, a product of sensationally rotten breeding, and so is how she bequeaths upon the earth her chaos.

She stands before this cave, this mirror, the bitter voice of the air coaxing her eyes to release, drawing tears that would never come, lusting to see her crumble, but she is fleshed from metal and the ways of the gladiators, and no body of her lord father's making would so quickly besmirch his name.