Asch

In all reality, it seemed the blue kingly son was more surprised than she, though it was her shoulder that was smoldering. Whatever had broken her self-preservation instinct was not truly important, though she suspected it was somehow her twin sister who was at fault for that particular way of growing up. In a twisted fashion, Asch felt rather regretful that she was still causing him grief, as he seemed strangled by the fact that she was apologizing to him rather than the inverse option. He seemed to have suddenly been imbued with stone, riveted him to the Rotunda. Frozen, stilled, encased in ice and time. As if he were clueless as to how to proceed, process, handle the situation presented to him in the form of her broken, battered, burned and cindered body. Then all at once he comes to life, animated, seizing and exploding with concern and caustic passion. It brings a gentle smile to her face, to see him so worried, and attempts to pacify his pleas for forgiveness she'd granted long before he'd recognized the damage he had done.

"It's okay, I promise! It doesn't hurt nearly as bad as the first time," she assured with a helpless little laugh, not sure how to respond wholly to his concern. Nobody had ever shown concern for her aside from Papa, and he had disappeared a long time ago. She doesn't recognize her own admission, the story of her scars written into the rippled flesh healed too late by Lena's magic. Not capable of detection unless one were to feel, to look too closely, inspect. His tears only furthered her sudden panic and she dances closer, cooing in the manner she'd always used on her sister when her tears would come unbidden. "It's okay! It's okay, I'm fine, I'm not mad," she babbles back in return, his apologies twining with her reassurances like a rope that will soon become the fibers of their past, woven into a blanket they carry upon their shoulders to warm themselves with on lonely nights.

Healer. It reminds her of Lena, and she calms as he does in turn. Her smile never wavers, content and understanding. Magic was frightening, uncontrollable. She'd been too angry to be scared at first when she'd boiled her captor's blood, but it had come in time. Fear of her own power. "No, I'll be okay. Like I said, it's not as bad as last time. Lena can fix it when we get home." Her mind is simplistic when it comes to topics regarding herself, when it comes to her health, her safety, her importance. For she has none in her own eyes, merely a flask to better others, a stool for those who care enough to befriend her to scale her to the tips of their dreams. A down pillow to catch them when they topple from their foolish precipices.

His sniffling drove her forth, attempting to breach the void between them and brush the warmth of her lips down the canvas of his cheek in silent acceptance of the broken half-tale he'd begun to spin. Instead, she draws him in with tales of her own, spun in blood and ink and sorrow and pain beyond what the child before her could imagine. Their paths had become divergent the moment she was stolen away, and it was like viewing a mirror where she was the one distorted, reflecting a perfection she might have achieved had Confutatis not taken her soul and bent and twisted with the heat of her rage. As little as she desired to remember, to scrape off the plaster covering the wound still so fresh in her malleable mind, her selflessness drove her to masochism in hopes of steadying her only friend.

"When I was really young, a mare named Confutatis stole myself, my mother and my twin sister. They held us captive, hurt us, starved us. My mother challenged her one day, and I grabbed my sister and tried to run. They cornered us, and one of them had a dragon companion. It swooped down on us as we were trying to run and burned us, but I shoved Wennie down and it got my back." Twisting, contorting, she highlights the horrors of her body for him to become captivated by. The shiny twist of skin that is a little too pale to match the gold and cocoa of her coat, a seeming trick of the light until attention was riveted properly upon it. "But Wennie was hurt, and I was so mad. Furious. All I could think was I wanted him to hurt, to die. I wanted to kill him. And I screamed at him, and it was like...it was like someone let all the air out of me all at once. Like the bang of rocks when they roll down a hill, and then he was yelling and I could feel the connection I had to him. Feel what I was doing to him. And I made him burn, for hurting my sister." Darkness creeps into the innocent tale she spins like yarn on a wheel for him, remembering the sick taste of pleasure she'd felt to have him squirming in agony at her mercy.

"Wennie has magic too, she can animate dead things and talk to their spirits. Manipulate their energy. But I'm used to that, she's always been better than me, I just protect her as much as I can. So it's okay, I'm glad you discovered you have it!" Excitement reigns supreme, eyes glittering naively as her little tail curls around her hocks. "It gets easier to control, I promise. Maybe I can practice with you?" She tries to negate the admission of her past with promises of the future, and maybe she wants to secure more time with her new, only friend. Maybe she just wanted companionship, for he could surely train on his own.

all those years never feeling pretty