my blood is a flood of rubies, precious stones
it keeps my veins hot, the fires find a home in me

“Everything.”

She was still there—muzzle pressed against her cheek, he could feel her, and she was still there even though a roaring blackness had taken over his world. He saw nothing—heard nothing—there was just that surging wave of darkness, vertigo washing through his soul.

He felt nauseous.. out of breath, like he'd been running for days on end, heart trembling and floor falling out from under him.

What's wrong, he had said, and she had said,

everything.

A beast with sharp, poisoned teeth lodged in her back, its black venom already running through her veins.

How do you save someone, when you can barely stand up yourself? How do you fix someone else—fix the everything for them—when you can't even outpace your own demons? They held his tail, and they held it tight, hanging on for the ride (somewhere, white wings were flapping, some strange sense of duty making her play with the bird while Diego feigned disinterest). Last time, he'd just been there. Last time, she'd just needed.. a presence...

This.. was bound to go so much deeper.. and she was a smart kid, she had to be, logic demanded it—whatever it was that was about to come out of her mouth was bound to hurt, in one way or another. It felt like laying his head down underneath an axe, that wait, heart strangled by its own veins.

“Lee,” and the eyes that had stared through her suddenly grew sharper, focus returning, meeting her gaze.

She still looked like shit. Her eyes looked like shit, like the poison had spread there too, clouding up whatever she saw, “how do you fix a world that’s fucked by default?”

How about by asking someone who has the answer?

Mauja's only experience with fucked-up worlds lay in helping to fuck them up, and his mind ran bloodied images in front of his eyes with merciless clarity—memories, every single one of them. Memories. Not dreams, not fantasizes, not some far-off story turned to implausible gossip, not even artistic renditions, but fucking memories and he could still smell the blood.

I don't know what you're talking about, he wanted to protest, why do we have to fix this world, what's wrong with it, I don't know, life sucks, collective suicide?

“There was an invasion, Lee.”

She might as well have punched him in the face.

There was an invasion, Lee.
There was an invasion.
There was an invasion.
There was an invasion.

There was an invasion, Lee.

Some assholes,

invaded.

My name is fucking Mauja and I'm an asshole. Pleased to meet you.

How could he fix her broken, fucked-up world if his own moral compass was apparently pointing in the most goddamned direction? It pointed somewhere, gods knew where, down some shortcut to hell probably, and his breathing was shallow and quiet (did he even breathe at all? he wasn't sure, he couldn't tell, he felt sick and his heart was hammering way too fast, like thunder). He—he—he—he'd fucking been there. He had come there. He'd been asked to come, more or less; he'd come and he'd been ready to fight for a cause he had only borrowed for the moment, because Ophelia had made it seem right. She had given him reason. She had told him it was okay. She had allowed him to become a mule, content to let someone else take responsibility—

They were screaming in his head now, those memories. Screaming, but he hadn't cared, because someone else had said it was okay, that it was right—

But everything was just wrong and he knew nothing and he thought he had known something at least but turns out he didn't and—

And then she asked the question to which he had all the answers.

“Who's that evil?”

Your mother. Archibald, and Kaj. Kahlua. And.. I.

He was still staring away, tense, cold and rigid like a statue—as ever, she shamed him, cradled against his neck, so raw and passionate and.. and.. beneath all those funky words and her electric, nearly savage eyes she had a heart that was so much more golden than his.

Frostheart.

No—he was dead and buried.

"I was there," he finally said, to the night, talons and wings slicing through the air with precise grace, voice as heavy as his heart. Gods, he just wanted to fall to—no, through—the goddamned floor and rewind and never have to have this conversation or think of these things or, and, or.. or, or, and.. and.. running away again, aren't we?

And I wasn't there to stop it.

I was there to fight.

Because I could.

He wanted to defend it—to say that it was the kind of shit that happened, that Kaj and Archibald allowed everyone who wanted to to stay, but war causes trauma, doesn't it?

He thought of he Magnar, and how they had battled for generations to regain their ancestral homeland, taken from them on a whim by the renegade unicorns—and he thought of Myrkdalur, of the exhaustion and the blood and the pain .. and he thought of that first sunrise, of co-existence and peace.

"I am a monster, Elding," he finally said, something quiet burning around his words, around his eyes, a lonely sparrow of flame lighting up the dark for a moment before disappearing in a crackling flash.

You make me a monster.

[ @[Roskuld] ]

lord, the demands you're making-
help the monster on two feet
walk him down the hall, repeat
and when he's strong enough to stand alone
you'll notice what big teeth . . .