There was a violence in the ichor of her blood that rattled and clanged, and the sound of its song rang like a bell tolling in the dawn mist. Many times she had fought it and many more times she had let it pass through her body like music through a violin, pouring hot red light into the cracks that riddled her soul. Her mother and her father, they had seen the fire in her heart, knowing it would burn the night like a match struck against petrol, and many hours they had wondered what path their daughter (bleached by the sun and the wild) would take. For many years she could not name herself, did not know the truth within - for it is not easy to see yourself in the mirror when you are standing in the dark. You might catch slivers of a reflection, but quickly that sun-girl had come to realise the peroxide silver of moonlight distorted reality into a lie. And so many lies she had kept. To herself, from herself - within and without. 

Solis, you see then, had saved her. In the midst of her dreamless, blackened chaos he had reached down and plucked her from the abyss, leading her not into temptation and delivering her from evil. To Solterra she had blazed, leaving the earth behind her feet charred from the heat of her punching ambition and bite. A lifetime of disarray smoothed out in a single decision, or so she had thought. For who could ever truly escape their demons? Rhoswen had been sorely naive to think her troubles would end the day she walked out that Denoctian door, leaving behind blood and a pair of shark-blue eyes set to haunt her until their worlds would collide once more. She could still remember the moment he had slipped into the ballroom beside her - in that ancient aching moment, narrated by tapestries and gold, knowing that this was where her ruin had truly began. 

Rhoswen could never be the same. She knew what it was to love a man, and, more than that, a child - she was a harbinger, an omen of life and death and betrayal - but wasn't that the beauty of the human condition? The weakness of a heart set to burn for another. 

There was always a price to pay for love.

And as she turned a ruby-glass cheek toward the horizon, the violet light writing poems upon her oh-so-soft skin, Rhoswen saw Bexley's sacrifice for the first time. Except it was no sacrifice - it was the scene of a crime laid riddled by her guilty fingers. At a loose glance she might have thought her fair-haired friend had changed not at all - still that biting gaze leading a walk that oozed intent. But there it was: a tall florid scar that stared at her with dried-red eyes as if it were an entity all of its own to spit at her: 'what the fuck are you looking at?''. Rhoswen's chest hitched, marooned in a sea of frustration and regret. What to do with this emotion? This entire fucking world that lived inside of her? Bexley drew near enough now that Rhos could smell the sand and the heat on her skin, flooding her senses with a cutthroat homesickness that she had not allowed herself to feel since that first night back in Denocte. Gods, she missed the desert.

They settled together, each coiled with a tension that had brewed in darkness for what could have been an eternity, and as Bex spoke, Rhoswen felt their eyes meet for the first time. Electric-shot blue against a howling stormful grey. Two women caught in the mess of men. No longer. 

"You came."

---

@Bexley <33

With a hitch of curdled breath and regret, she wondered then just how many times she had imagined this moment. How many hours had she laid awake, staring at white walls and glittering skies, in hope of an answer to her impossible question? You see, the night was a perfect stage to set upon your dreams and your nightmares - for darkness had a way of tangling love and loss together until you could not tell either face apart: had she longed for this chance at redemption, or loathed it long into the labyrinth of sleep and time? But the dawn will always come, and it will always shatter the illusion that your reality is distant and obscure: light, be it blood-red or ichor-gold, will always reveal the proximity of all things from which you wish to escape. 

The curling of Bexley's auric lip drew her attention in toward the present once more, her gaze smoothing to dispel the wall of smoke in her eyes. There was no place for resistance here, not now. 

We are not strangers. As much as I would want to pretend. Hurting someone is still an act of intimacy.

Rhoswen did not flinch at the soft whip of Bexley's voice; her tone did not matter, her words did not matter - Rhos knew the meaning and the truth. Betrayal is a thimble of arsenic: it does not matter how small the act may be, for its poison will spread regardless. Toxic, septic, destructive. In the name of love? Rhos could not bear to look away from her golden companion, but if she had, her gaze would have turned to a horizon that shrank from the noxious silhouette of a man born to ruin her. "Nothing I can say will take back the events of months past, the mistakes made others, by myself -" the red woman's voice levelled like a stone dropped in water, sizzling from the heat of an eternal sun. 

"I have since learned the truth of so many things," the wind whipped her hair into a cloud of sanguine sand, and whistled in and out of the women's legs as they stood locked in space, "but most of all, Bex, I'm just really fucking sorry." She took a step closer, Bexley's scent dancing into her lungs,

"For everything."

---

@Bexley yo yo

Deep within the cavern of her heart, ash curdles like old milk: pale and congealed. Was it worth it? Was he worth it? - Her daughter, even? Rhoswen's mind flicks through reels of black-and-white film, watching the past's events unfold once more, though this time with new eyes. Eyes that had seen the grotesque reality of all the choices we make on a stupid fucking lovesick whim. Consequences are ugly - but they are real. They are not stories to be told to children who stray too far, not dreams to be conjured in the black nebula of night. They are a lived reality, and Bexley was living hers right now. Lambent virginal light clung to her garish scar, holding Rhoswen's attention for a moment too long; she did not mean to stare, but how could she deny the gravity of its presence? For their eyes meet again, clashing, reaching, hoping. Was there even a solution to be found here in this pit she has forged - this hollow place where nothing felt familiar and time passed into oblivion. Guilt rummaged through her bones like a thief in the night; twisting its knife deeper into the fine sinew beneath her skin. 


No heroes here. No victors. 

"What do you want? What are you expecting to happen?"

There is a moment, then, where Rhoswen simply watches Bexley. Gazing aimlessly without intention, without anticipation, in remembrance of a simpler time: days defined by languor and hot sand, spears of laughter pitched into the wide sun-sky like javelins thrown over and over again; what she wouldn't give to turn back the clock. Of course she knew it was an impossibility, but that did not stop her from wishing for it regardless. All Rhoswen could do now was to glue back the broken shards of their friendship the only way she knew how - if Bexley should allow her so. Silence, a handful of breeze to catch them both, until - "I don't know, Bex." The truth is as brutal as it is cold; there were no answers here, no right and wrong: there was only an endless open chasm before them - waiting, calling. There was no point lying, no sense in trying to cast meaningless words into the air to appease Bexley, or Solis, or both. "I suppose in my selfishness, I can only hope you will forgive me."

---

@Bexley