oh honey darling, i'd love to kill you, load up my shotgun, you kill me too -

exley hates her for being alive.

The letter comes like an augury, definite and Delphic. She cannot be sure she was even conscious before it reached her because she cannot remember anything before the moment it comes to hover in front of her chest: not the past few sunrises, not why she is here in the crowded, stifling markets, if she has seen Apolonia since the Incident. Nothing but little snippets of sunlight, sound waves. Misery.

She snatches it and tucks it under her hair, against the line of her shoulder. No one seems to notice. They are too busy with their prophecies and their fear and their sharpening of blades. So it is easy, relatively, for Bexley to slink out of the crowd and down an abandoned alley so dusty and narrow it’s evident nothing but lizards could’ve frequented it for quite a long time. It is oppressively quiet. She can hear only the light song of wind and the far-away chime of voices so faint they’ve become a hum. Dirty sunlight gleams off the sandstone and adobe. She glances over her shoulder just to make sure, but of course there is nothing and no one there; it is only the bright beat of her own heart that could cause any trouble, here.

The letter is unfolded with little fanfare. She reads it once, and then again. Almost she has to smile at the way it has been handled, and how obvious it is that the words were written and then rewritten and then written again, and that they are living in a world so barren and restricted a queen cannot find a second piece of paper to draft a message one.

Please. Sera.

Ah, and here is the hatred setting in, hot like lava, bright like water: until this moment two of the brightest spots of her life had been extinguished, and somehow it made it easier, to know that they were equal in death, and equally untouchable: now Seraphina is alive, and Bexley wonders which god decided to exchange the one life for the other and why.

And what she might offer to reverse it.

Bexley spills a jet of searing light like a fountain onto the note, until it bursts into flame and goes trickling in little pieces of ash to rest on the cobblestone. She watches the flakes drift in the dead breeze like so many butterflies and for a moment merely breathes.

It is in defeat that she turns toward the edge of the city.

From the markets to the mouth of the canyon is it not so long a walk, not when it feels as though walking is the only thing Bexley has been doing recently, walking, and weeping, and cursing; yet as she passes through the desert and past the oasis she is bizarrely silent for the first time in days, smothered by the heat and the wind and the crushing omniscience of danger. The chain around her throat is now a collar. The scar across her cheek pulses and shifts. There is a moment where the light catches it just right and she makes it disappear, just for half a second, and it feels so wrong it makes her chest hurt.

Finally the sand slips into rock. Dull-eyed, Bexley winds down the slope and onto the first lip of the canyon, and around the next corner is her ghost, beautiful as ever.

She draws to an unsure stop near the edge of the ridge. Seraphina is here, alive but all wrong, in an outfit Bexley has never seen before, wearing a new wreath of scars, bruised and a little wasted away, but underneath it is still her: the mismatched eyes, the dark lips, the quicksilver stripes, and even beneath her hatred the regent is so relieved she could almost cry.

Hm, says Bexley. She screws up one eye against the glaring sun. Looks like we're both undead.

oh honey darling, i'd love to kill you, load up my shotgun, you kill me too -

here is nothing like love in Bexley’s gaze, when she looks at Seraphina.

Nothing like anything.

For the first time in her existence she is really, truly dead. Asleep. Extinct. Insensate. For a girl who was born foaming at the mouth, who knows apathy about as well as she knows God (which is to say not at all) it is utterly horrifying. It is the first time she has ever been truly quiet. In the light, Solterran sun shines through her dull, pale eyes and turns them to sea glass so clear and still it is nauseating, if not almost demonic.

There is nothing to say. Or too much, but it’s all impossible. Even though she manages that dry, casual quip, it takes all of her energy. It drains from her like a brain bleed. Even breathing has started to hurt. She feels salt start to encrust the corners of her mouth, and cannot be sure if it is tears, or sweat, or dark, dry blood. The canyon howls with toothy wind; it sprays the back of her legs with red dust, rusting the gold there until, underneath, it could be nothing prettier than unkempt steel. Even the bleached white of her hair is streaked now with thin slashes of dirty crimson. She is a ghost. Not the Ghost, Raum has beaten her even at that - but a ghost, nonetheless.

Seraphina speaks. It makes her brain hurt. It sounds like a long-forgotten memory. Like a day she has managed to scoop from a time like this that happened years ago. Her ear twitches, and she leans forward; as much as the sound pains her, it is still easy. The familiarity is a comfort.

Then it registers fully.

Raum, says Seraphina, and it is word enough to turn Bexley off from the conversation completely. Her heart stops. Her body, again, is a vessel for rage and trauma and terror. She glowers, her lip curls: the hair across her spine bristles: for a brief moment something violent and totally exanimate flashes in her eyes, and then they are black again, truly dead and not just undead, and if any tears form they are blinked away faster than they become visible.

Bexley turns to leave. Blood is pouring, pouring and rushing in her ears so loud that she cannot hear anything else, so fast that it turns her vision black, and she does turn her back, at least, but does not make it more than a few strides before her foolish, bitter heart drags her back. She stops in place. Her head snaps suddenly and violently, like a seizure. The rest of her body follows.

She faces the ex-queen from a few strides farther away: coldly, and with discontent.

Acton, says Seraphina, and the little girl inside of Bexley wants to say: you don’t have the right to use his name like that. Or: whatever it is, don’t tell me. Or: he’s not really dead, is he?

Of course she says nothing, because to hear it would only be another heartbreak, and she is not so sure her heart can handle another one: even if he is alive, if, if (she still says if, knowing it is stupid and impossible), the whiplash might be fatal for her.

I’m sorry, says Seraphina, and all at once the tears begin to pour from her like a river.

Don’t, she warns. Say that. Don’t, don’t, don’t. She heaves for breath now against the immense tightness in her chest. It hurts, everything hurts, and Bexley would have traded her life for either one of theirs but neither of them will ever get to know it, and the emotion that overcomes her - sorrow, fury, total heartache - is so intense that, unbidden, light starts to mix with her tears and pour from her eyes, then her nostrils, then her mouth.

When she hears the sizzle of her magic hitting the ground, she startles. Then turns it off like a switch.

Bexley repeats: Don’t say that. Instead,  she offers, blue eyes bright with tears, voice wavering in the new heat, trembling like a fawn, Kill him. Or I will.

oh honey darling, i'd love to kill you, load up my shotgun, you kill me too -

ill him kill him kill him -

For the first time in many years, Bexley thinks of her brother.

She cannot quite remember what his face looks like, or looked like. Only that he was taller than her, and blue-eyed too, and beautiful: she remembers that the people wanted him dead like they wanted to breath, like a mortal sickness desires for a cure. Of course she had loved him, but it had not mattered. All her love could not have outweighed his wrongdoings. She wonders for the very first time, and with a little blink of dreadful surprise, if Laszlo had been evil too, and if she had simply chosen to disregard it with all the naive willfulness of a child.

Does that make her evil, too?

No, but he is not like Raum, because nobody loves Raum. Not anymore. Not after what he’s done, how he kills so casually. There is the lesson: love breeds violence as much as it excuses it.

Acton flashes in her head again, and her tears spill faster. Love breeds violence indeed - the scar on her face starts to pulse, and her heart constricts in her chest as though it is close to wilting, and for all her anger there is a brief, steeply black moment in which she can think nothing but I miss you. I miss you. It is a mantra Bexley has repeated so many times it beats like a tattoo now on her tongue. The words are more familiar than her own body. Than Solterra. Than her daughter. And the feeling, even, is more intimate than that. It is all she knows how to do.

She grits her teeth, jaw clenching until it spurs stars in the blackness of her inner forehead. The opiate glare of the sun makes her feel close-to-death. Alive, then, however unfortunate -

But all her misery cannot compare to the wonder in her eyes when Seraphina starts to float. Her heart rises against her throat and churns there like a storm, and oh, she thinks she can feel herself rising too, as Seraphina’s hooves leave the ground, and her braids unknit themselves, and a scimitar built of fire sizzles and spits at her side, and the slices of gold in her cheek seem to shimmer: she is a god, now, but better than a god, a girl with feelings and magic and mortal blood, more admirable than any deity. There is something so impressive about the honest goodness of a real person. More impressive than any religion. I love you, she wants to say, wants to say so badly, but does not. Only smiles. I admire you. I trust you - and for someone so badly damaged, that is the most valuable thing of all.

She does not fear the look of savage hunger in Seraphina’s eyes, though maybe she should: instead, she is utterly relieved to see the queen’s barbarity, if only to know a little better she is not the only one that has made insane.

And to know that Raum will not escape her.

Alive again. Bexley grins, an awful, too-sharp thing. A visible shudder wracks her body as Seraphina speaks, as if she has been possessed: something in her has woken, hungry and snarling, and she cannot hear anything but the thrum of bloodlust in her ears and an awful, deep-set buzzing in her jaw, as if her body is preparing to come apart at the seams. She could fall apart already for the severity of her relief. What she will feel when she finally sees the inside of Raum’s skull is unimaginable.

Yes, she says, with all the tearfulness and tender-caring of someone accepting a marriage proposal. Her mouth opens as if to finish the thought, but there is nothing else to say. Simply yes, I will kill him, and I will do it in the worst way I know how.

Randomly Bexley remembers that she is not the only person in the world. That her griefs are, in one way or another, shared. She glances at the tiger-stripes of gold on Seraphina's cheeks, the way her mane curls around her like a wave, the empty, feral hunger in her eyes, and still it is not fear that overcomes her, but, maybe, concern. Then, stilted like a puppet: Why did he come for you?

Just in case there is any rhyme or reason to hatred that she has not yet discovered.

oh honey darling, i'd love to kill you, load up my shotgun, you kill me too -

es.

She wants to pray. Dear God, I waited for you, and you gave me a girl. The girl—the one with the gold and the powers and the heart that does not ever stop. You gave me a girl and you killed her, and she came back, and I don’t care if it was you or if it was the Devil or just the roundabout way of life on the earth, you gave me a girl and she died and came back, and now we are going to kill together. Because the man we are going to kill deserves it, and because I know justice comes on the blade of my own perfect knife.  Because he killed me, he killed my husband, he killed Rhoswen, he killed Solterra. Something brought the girl that you gave me back from the dead. And I am not going to let this opportunity pass. I am not going to let her die again without justice, blood-red or dark-blue. Justice comes on our shared tongue. Because I know what it feels like to kill. And she knows what it feels like to kill. And we both know what it feels like to die.

Bexley realizes she is smiling. It feels foreign on her face, and good, like living. There is a matching one on Seraphina’s dark, dusty lips; it splits her terrible, beautiful face into a facsimile of something pleased, like a painting gone horribly wrong, but it doesn’t matter, Bexley sees it for what it is. Sees her for who she is. Alive and dead. Alive again. They match. And they have matching scars now, too—

Oh, there is nothing but fate that could have done this, coincidence, a cruel god. Bexley curls a lip and feels the tight, plasticky movement of the closed gash against her cheek—they match in scars now too, inflicted by crows, infected by anger. Solterra’s gold and silver girls. Bexley has never been a queen, not quite, but she could be. And Seraphina has always been a queen, but often without knowing how. (Bexley loves her more for it.) They are previously-perfect dolls passed through funhouse mirrors, passed through terrible worlds: where Seraphina turned silver Bexley turned gold, where she turned hot Seraphina turned gold, and here they are, against all odds, the culmination of a world that cannot decide whether they deserve to live or not.

She blinks, dazed, and magic is still in the air. Heavy as humidity. Seraphina’s white hair swirls around her in crashing, shimmering waves, and her hooves hang oh-so-slightly off the sunbaked ground. For the first time Bexley is aware of the atmosphere. The sun watching incessantly from overhead. The way it burns a sigil into the curve of her back, melts her bright hair into something like soot. Her own magic is alive now, twisting and flickering, gnawing at the inside of her mouth, and she is not quite sure what it is doing except it is hot, hot hot like the rage boiling in her chest, heat building exponentially until it sounds-feels-hurts like an explosion.

Her ears ring. She thinks of the cave.

“We are hurt too, Seraphina,” remarks Bexley, the most obvious thing in the world. Her eyes glitter like ice. “The difference is—“

And the pause hangs in the air for a long moment, too long, until it becomes less about thought and more about drama.

“—he’s a cunt,” she finishes finally, and bursts into a howling laughter that racks her a little too long to be normal. The nausea in her stomach begins to subside. Solterra’s golden girl throws her queen a huge, wolfish smile, says “Whenever you need me,”, and then turns back into the canyon, a golden speck in a golden chasm.