[P] oath

[Sabine]

s a b i n e you are a garden  that will one day bloom She stares at the guards with an expression so pensive, so troubled, she does not think they would recognise her even if they knew who she was. Sabi barely recognises herself. She thinks of the cool oasis waters and of the strange gaunt woman staring back; the panels of her face seemed to lean in too close, the line of her lips now pinched where once it had been soft. Only her horns stood changeless, drinking in the undulating light and painting it ultramarine. She wonders what they would look like dipped in red. The guard's laughter does not cease when their mouths sew shut; their hyena-bark clatters on like a broken siren in her skull, ricocheting violently.  It sounds like everything else screaming in her head: sick. How could the world beget laughter when her mother was--when her mother was--was?  The letter feels like a dead thing against her skin and she is torn between love and hate for the last trace of a bygone era. For that is all she can see when she flicks back through the pages of her life: oil-canvasses and watercolours that could never quite capture the haunting essence of her childhood. How could art possibly portray the emptiness in a child's heart where a mother's love should be? She doesn't realise, but she is shaking. Her skin ripples like cloth dancing in a summer wind. Her chest is full of time -- time lost and won; precious moments destroyed irretrievably by the actions of a man she loved more than anything else on this small, dark earth. Was it true? The tales that were occupying the homes of innocent men, women and children all across the land. Tales of murder, deceit, torture, tyranny.  And then the guards part, recoiling like rats from a flame as Solterra's king enters their paradise. And her heart, impossibly, beats that little bit faster. No. No. She wants to run but her legs are anchored to the sand; she wants to scream but her throat is constricted by fear. She can't do this, not when her heart is still weeping from a dozen different holes; when her heart might never stop weeping from that one last hole. Too weak, too fragile, too small to make her parents to love each other they way parents should. Nausea shoots up her throat and with wild eyes she glances back toward the desert, hoping for salvation before -- "Sabi," There is a florid light flashing behind the sockets of her eyes, just out of reach. It thickens and twists in the dark space within her skull, contorting at the sound of Raum's voice and Sabine cannot bury the paralysing feeling that it is not of her own design. She feels the colour of it: red and gold and red again. She turns to look upon her father, but she sees only the intimate oscillation of gold-light eating away at the bones of a guilty man's face. She sees fire licking at his sclera and his teeth as he smiles at her the way a wolf might smile at a lamb, and the bright light at the back of her head does not dim -- it is trying to tell her something. Someone is trying to tell her something. She is dreaming in a nightmare.  He does not smell the same. His eyes, once musing, are now bleak winters boring into his cranium. His ribs are wider, or maybe his flesh is simply narrower. They had told Sabi she was going to meet a monster, and for the first time, she sees what they have seen.  Silent, spectral, she follows him. Is that not all she knows? All she has ever done? Meek Sabine, mild Sabine. And still that red flashing light sings on.  They pass people in halls that shrink from Raum's shadow and she wonders what he has done here. Then she thinks again, she does not ever want to know what he has done here.  They reach the throne room at last and he turns to her in the same way he always did; it catches her off-guard. The movement of his sterling-silver skin toward her makes her bones itch and she flinches intensely at the kiss, stepping out of reach; she knows it will hurt him, but for the first time, she does not care. Did he care when he slaughtered Acton? Did he care when Rhoswen died on the mountain, alone and burning? Did he care when he starved a city of innocents? The rumours mill like fish in a small pond, and she knows they do not sound like rumours anymore.  “I have missed you. What brings you here? Are you well?” Silence clangs like a band marching to the beat of her heart. How can he speak to her as though Denocte had risen up around them and the earth had rewound several suns? She stares at him as if she were trying to read a book written in a language she could not understand. And it dawns on her: he does not know. Sabine begins to tremble once more and that great light flares so suddenly and so brightly she thinks she might collapse from the heat of it -- something in it feels like Rhoswen, something strong and terrible. "She's dead," the words come like a freight train. Loud. Violent. Breathless. "Rhoswen." Two breaths, stumbling over each other, "she killed herself." And the letter she has kept safe for more days than she cares to count tumbles into the space between them like a knife severing a thread already painfully bare.

art created by rhiaan

@Raum