All Welcome this is a call to action

blessed in spirit
are the poor

The more he says the sicker she feels. It’s a rock in the bottom of her stomach, a fist clawing inside her ribs. Marisol has not been so—so upset, so infuriated, in ages. And what can she do but let him scream at her? Nevermind that it wasn’t her shift to be out in the middle of the night, nevermind that Ard and Erd had never really participated in the Halcyon despite bearing the noble title, never mind that Marisol was not a mother and these fully-grown adults were not her fucking children.

Nevermind all that, oh no, it’s time for civility, time to grit her teeth and bear the sting as Ard tears into her like a child throwing a tantrum. Her eyes are burning now, shiny and trembling as if with the threat of tears. She feels her throat closing up with a fist of salt. You don’t understand, she wants to say, You don’t know what I have to do, but even before the words threaten to spill she knows they will not help and holds them back with a deathly clenched jaw.

But anger is nothing more than an offshoot of love, and gods she loves them, her little family. There is nothing she would not do.

The world closes into a pinpoint, all black-and-silk, all threatening blood. She watches with a gaze that is somehow fragile and burning all at once, eyes flickering under their glaze of tears from Rhone as he speaks to Theodosia as she leaves, and then it is just them, or at least that’s what it feels like, as Marisol’s dark eyes meet Ard’s with an intensity that says I’m sorry over and over again.

It takes her a moment to speak. She clears her throat awkwardly, trying to remove a brick of salt that just won’t budge. Her chest is pulsing with an awful heat-stroke alternation of sorrow and anger, panic and control, love and the part of her that begs for perfect apathy and has never been satisfied. Though she is still, her whole body and wings alternate flickering as if she is shooing off a fly that isn’t there. Her eyes don’t move from Ard’s. But as she blinks, every part of her expression burns with just-suppressed emotion.

“The whole world is the enemy when you lose what you love,” Marisol says in a voice that is breaking with sorrow. A voice that says she knows from experience. “I’m sorry…” her voice fails for a moment. She sucks in a painful breath and her eyes flash with tears. In her head she is watching a small girl with a white stocking get crushed into the blood-red sand, over, and over, and over again. “That you feel I am the enemy now. Whether or not you forgive me, I will do everything I can to find him. To lose you or your brother would be… a death to my heart. An amputation.”

Her head spins. She sniffs, and for the first time since her turning is not fully aware of the sharpness of her teeth; nor can she hear the snarling in her heart. “If you don’t think he’s not here, then you’re right, he isn’t here. I’ll send an emissary to each court to investigate. I’ll go check in Tinea if the Ilati have seen him. Thank you, Rhone,” she adds as an aside. Her voice is raw and croaky—it is the most she’s spoken at once for a long, long time. “Ard…”

“Whatever I can do, I will. I swear it on my blood.”

She offers him an almost-tearful blink, and then she turns and soars upward first toward the barracks and then toward Tinea.