[P] oath

[Sabine]

s a b i n e you are a garden  that will one day bloom ( Sabine, ) The parchment trembles between her telekinesis. She knows each tight coil of ink, every trace of all the letters that are carved like angels atop gravestones; she knows where the sentences lead and how the letter ends and yet -- each time she breaks her gaze across the paper, the girl cannot stop herself from hoping that this time the words will have realigned and her world will not be as broken as it is right now. ( My little bird ) These words have traversed universes to be here; in this moment; to be read by moon-wide eyes rubbed red. It carries traces of Her still; as the last thing she had touched before -  ( I do not have much time ) She treads slowly; each distracted, stilted movement bringing her closer to a warring city she no longer fears. Her once-lustrous ribbons of hair have spun into knotted spirals that quiver like nests of caramel against her dusty skin, and as the sunlight thickens with the thudding tide of midday, it burns bright enough to reveal a network of tear-stained pathways that beat down her cheeks.   Only the glassy blue of her horns shines, still, beneath that devastating wash of gold swallowing the desert whole.  ( I need you to know that I am sorry ) Worst of all, is the smell of smoke etched into the parchment's delicate wrinkles. It leaches into her bonemarrow like a virus she cannot shake; infecting the small sacred memories she had kept safe for so long. Sweet, white flashes of an afternoon by the lake, when everything had been quieter and simpler and her mother had still been able to smile. ( I am sorry I was not the mother you needed me to be ) She cannot feel her lips, but she knows they are as cracked as the arid earth upon which she moves. She cannot feel her breath, but she knows it swings on like a pendulum between her lungs and the air, animating her body that feels a casket to carry all the shattered and jagged shards of her heart.  ( Please look after your father... he needs you more than you know ) Rhoswen's final words fall into the chasm that now exists in her place. There is nothing left to read.  Sabine thinks of her father and sees a world painted by a brush dipped in blue. She sees the blade that cannot glint for the six feet of soil crushing it so. Echoes of laughter and godless love detonate violently like celestial grenades within her ribs and suddenly the capitol rises up from the sand like a great mythical beast. She sees the face of her mother in the brilliant, brutal walls that stare at her so viciously and the realisation brings her body to its knees beneath the unearthly weight of her all-consuming grief.  --- When the first sentry reaches that blue-eyed girl standing like a wraith at the gates of Solterra, they will not see beyond the gaunt kiss of her too-sharp hips or the industrial virginity of her hollow gaze. They will not notice that dark, jaded parchment folded against her hip. She will tell them she has come to request an audience with the king, and they will bark a laugh that is cut short by the black bleakness of the child's stare.  If death should be the price, Sabine was ready to pay.

art created by rhiaan

@Raum