[P] all the light we cannot see

[Rhoswen]

As a child, they said she wore a ballgown fashioned from an ancient sun, and when you saw her you could not deny the truth of it. It was not a colour you had ever seen before; beware the girl with the Delphic dress. The shadows lay tattered and bleached in her wake, for they could not withstand the might of a child cursed with Solis' heart. They loved and loathed her; pushing and pulling at the fissure between them until it yawned into a monochromatic void that harboured only the most bitter parts of she. 

And yet -- beneath the disorientating clamour and the violet bruises left by Caligo's disappointment -- someone loved the wild sunlit soul that so many had come to hate. He did not mind the way her smile lit matches in the dark, or the burning of his fingers at the touch of her lightbulb skin. He was not afraid of the way she loved the sun, and in return for this small virginal kindness, she fell in love with him. Except it had never felt like falling; not under the gentle caress of a summer innocence that sheltered them from the voices of doubt. They had tumbled through stained glass windows, hearts beating to a handmade rhythm inaudible to all ears but their own. In that fairy-lit haze everything had made sense. 

Until one day, it didn't. 

Rhoswen stood in a silence that was her own, leaning listlessly into the breeze that carried with it woodsmoke and magic. Autumn in Denocte had always possessed a charm unparalleled to any rivalling kingdom; the kaleidoscopic canopies, the crackle of fires old and new, the bite of skeletal leaves underfoot - even a siren with sand in her bones could see the beauty that lived here. But her mind was not on the seasons. Instead her thoughts drifted lazily in and out of the past, reliving secret sunny moments that had unfolded upon the very ground she now stood. If she concentrated hard enough, she could feel the memories as if they had been born again: her fingers entwining between his own, the sound of his placid laughter echoing across the water. 

The red woman shifted, her dark gaze rising from the reflection below up to the clear denim sky overhead. If asked whether she could turn back time, whether she could save the childhood happiness that she and Raum had created, Rhoswen knew that her answer would always, unconditionally, be no.

Rhos waited. It was only a matter of time before her ghost returned to haunt her; for that was all he was to her now: an empty husk of a boy once loved by a girl.

RHOSWEN

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

She stands, a lick of flame brighter than the red and golds of turning autumn. The trees and shed leaves littering the ground, frame her, turning her flame as bright as the sun. But even with her skin not as bright as any flare, Raum would find her. He would find Rhoswen even at the ends of the earth when all was black and her light snubbed out to naught but shadow and ash.
 
He moves to her, in pain, in vicious victory and hidden secrets. Once Raum told her all, but now he keeps his lips shut. The Crow is a piece of art, a tribute to death and blood and violence. He is painted red and silver, moonlight bleeding. He might have bathed before meeting her here, had he passed a stream, had he felt he should hide. But Rhoswen knows every part of him; this girl knows the blood on his hands and the black of his every thought.
 
The Ghost stops, a few feet stretching between them, feeling at once an intimate distance and yet a whole canyon dividing them. Acton’s blood is the spray and splatter, smear and brush of red paint across his skin. It adorns Raum in death and he does not hide it from Rhoswen.
 
Raum drowns her in electric blue as he studies her, before slipping his gaze away to study the way Denocte frames her. “Denocte.” He hums softly, as his gaze returns to her, “Can you not stay away, Rose?” Those words fall off his tongue, heavy and mocking. He knows she is made for more than darkness. She is made for sand and sun and mirages and a part of him still resents her for it. It prowls leonine and sets his gaze like teeth against the heat of her skin.

---

@Rhoswen - so sorry, this is off the boil

[Rhoswen]

As she stood before the water, Acton's letter ran a mile through her mind. Each hastily carved character left a blot of ink upon her glass skin; if only she had known it might well have been the magician's will. Upon the darkest dawn of the year a bird had broken her shallow slumber, a bird she knew instantly to be a crow; her blood had curdled, then, and dread beat like a hammer over and over again - though she could never have foretold the treachery entangled within Acton's epistle.

'Tonight Raum attacked Isra.'

Isra. The name reminded her of soft rain and softer skin. It cast webs between her teeth; a dozen dreamcatchers to snare all the darkest parts of she. Rhoswen knew little of Denocte's seaspun sovereign, but she knew enough to recognise her title. So, Raum had shown his hand to the night-queen already; a hand she was all too familiar with. Sometimes, beneath forests of constellations that taunted her in the great black, she could still feel his unholy noose around her throat. It was a terrible thing. The nightmares in her blood fathered tragedy, and with the most primitive, unbleached instinct Rhoswen knew that such tragedy was destined to kill the sun.

It was the odour of dank dripping death that came first. It rolled in waves toward her flesh; raw and wanting. She turned slowly, almost expecting to see a hooded figure wielding a sanguinary scythe. Instead, death's host wore a face that belonged to her memories, a face that told the story of her childhood and her broken, primastic heart. Raum. The woman swallowed the sight of him, aching to feel something other than the waxy dread that cooled against the roof of her mouth, for Acton's words rang like the bells of St Clements:

Rhoswen, I think he would have killed me too.

No, no, no. It could not be... The red woman burned quietly, her skull rising to the magic that stirred like a dragon laid dormant in her bones. Oh, Acton.

It had been over a year since their last encounter, and it felt as though that time had been stretched by dark loveless hands. This was not their world anymore, nothing carried their name; they had fallen through the cracks that had always threatened to devour their love whole. Her gaze, languid and enduring, travelled along the lines of Raum's frame, deciphering the secrets splattered against his pale skin. Bitter autumnal light reached for the ghost as he slunk closer, snatching at the truth with famished yearning as it began to reveal itself with every step he took. And still, Rhoswen's heart did not falter. Even when the stench of Acton's coagulated sweat and blood pillaged her nostrils -- when that black corvine voice lurched into the air like arsenic -- when she watched the memory of their love die -- Rhoswen did not yield. 

"Why?" she breathed.

RHOSWEN

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

Why?
 
Rhoswen’s question rings out like a death knell. But Raum does not flinch. He is forged of stone, cold, hard, unfeeling.
 
His gaze trails over every inch of the girl he once so adored and loved. A part of him shudders, a part of him that is not stone, that is not filled with arsenic and horror. It thrashes and rattles in its death throes – for Raum is dying. Each part of him is turning to ash and ruin and soon there will be nothing of him left.
 
“Because he was weak and a traitor.” Raum says at last. “Because he tried to kill me.” But Raum had been waiting for Acton’s attack. He knew what was to come, that Acton was no longer his brother, no longer his ally. He knew blood would flow like a river, that the ground would be bathed in red bloodshed.
 
He offers none of this to his Day girl of fire and light. He need not, for his skin is painted with his deeds and at his back is a ghost that haunts him all wan and pale. Oh Acton, where is your spark now?
 
Raum might have smiled, were he any other man.
 
Instead he tilts his head back, his eyes closed. Upon his lids the sun shines bright, it turns his gaze red, red,red and dries more the blood upon his skin. “Isra is gone.” He murmurs for Rhoswen, each word silken and monstrous. Each word is designed to be a dagger, for when is he ever happier than hurting the girl he hated to love?
 
Then his eyes open and they are gold and leonine. They a brilliant and bright and savage. Oh they are so laden with violence and promise and such savage desire. He sets them upon Rhoswen. He holds his fire girl there in chains of gold that sear with sunlight and the wickedness of stars.
 
From his lips slip such soft words but he has learned the art of barbed wire from Isra, and each silken word is designed to hurt. “And I am going to take Solterra from Seraphina.”
 
From you.

---

@Rhoswen - this made me profoundly uncomfortable. I am sorry he is such a -every expletive under the sun- 

[Rhoswen]

As a girl she'd had a vision of what her life might be: gold wings, white teeth, too-hot light -- but it could never have been this. This. Mother had always told her of the darkness that would come, and come, and never stop coming and with a resignation that punched steam from her violent veins, Rhoswen knew she had been right.

She stood now in a trance that was almost narcotic: staring out across earth's mirror until the horizon became one with the sky. A songbird painted it's cardinal dance upon a cloudless canvas, looping higher with each thrust of its small, strong wings, and Rhoswen wished, prayed, that it might take her hand and lead her away from the black grin of hell.

Raum's form seemed to blur and shift, as though some great god had smudged his skin into the very landscape. But what did vision matter when the sound of their souls colliding sent cracks of celestial thunder rupturing beneath noon's high sun? It was a cataclysm. It was ruin. It was grief and death and the end of all things. 

Rhoswen thought her skin might shatter like glass to reveal all the flowers she had once grown for Raum: daffodils and hydrangeas and foxgloves that had since wilted into the hollows of her despair. For him, she had been a greenhouse. Now she was but a tomb. Yet she does not break, for tombs are made not of glass but of ore and stone and metal: she was a mausoleum ready to shed flowers long-dead so that she might harbour his corpse instead.

The ghost spoke of Acton, of Isra, of Seraphina -- each name leaving a notch upon her heart until there was not an inch of red flesh that was not marked by those who had suffered at his hand. Acton, Isra, Seraphina. The red woman felt a snarl coil at the back of her throat, but she knew better than to satisfy Raum's dark gluttony, and so she simply stared back into his savage eyes until she thought her gaze might blind his own. 

There was nothing to stop him now. Nothing but perhaps the child they had brought into this bleak black world. Would he snuff the light out of their daughter's eyes, too?

"Sabine will never forgive you for what you have done," her voice is fire and blood, "and if I am sure of anything, it is that you will die knowing you were the one to break her weak little heart."

RHOSWEN

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

She stares at him, glorious and bright and savage. He knows he might burn within that gaze, but she is in every way the opposite to him. He has the water to douse her flames, he has the cold for freeze the very lava in her veins.
 
Their souls clash, their souls clamour, the desert resounds with their war. Raum looks upon Rhoswen, within her he sees the girl he once loved, the girl of flowers and sunlight – the girl who was the sun. And the sun turned its back on night.
 
Would he die to let her live? Would he let the moonlight of his skin fade to gold, just so she might rise? Never.
 
He holds her, as if his eyes held chains. He keeps every inch of her within his sight, he does not relent.
 
Yet Rhoswen speaks and her words are vipers in the sand, they are made to hurt and bite. She laces poison in his veins and the very flesh of his lungs pulls tight. A breath, she steals it from him as though she stole little more than a penny.
 
Anger does not stir within him, it does not rise like a monster out of slumber. No, Raum’s ire explodes, her poison the spark to his gasoline. He moves to her, bloody and wild. Vengeance seethes upon his tongue, it courses through his blood. His ears are crumpled atop his skull , his neck now an advancing serpent. His lips curl leonine, savage.
 
Yet he laughs. He laughs cruelly, the rumble of his chuckle the sinister grumbling of the earth set to quake. “You think she is weak?” he hisses, vitriolic. “She has your heart Rhoswen, how can she ever be weak?”
 
And his laugh is gone, the cutting smile with it. “But what will break her heart more? The mother who calls her weak and cared so little for her? Or her father who loved her but had to kill Acton?” Corvid his skull tilts, surveying the fire-girl before him. “I shall let Sabine decide what she will forgive and what she will not.”

From you.

---

@Rhoswen <3

[Rhoswen]

The world is warped by their chemical cacophony. The ground sinks a little beneath her hooves and the sky warbles a strange song of blue and white and blue again, until all she can hear is the hum of clouds passing overhead. At least it is a reprieve from the steady battle-beat of Raum's breath that assaulted the stratosphere above and beyond them. Rhoswen wonders (transiently, wearily) if the clouds had dreams of their own. If they longed to be emancipated from their deathless pilgrimage across earth's glass canopy; if they felt blood in their bleached formless lungs at the sight of the destruction unfolding miles below. She casts a lazy, scathing glance skyward as if to say, 'wanna swap? Yeah, that's what I thought', before reluctantly dragging her attention back to the Ghost.

Her rage is stagnant, it has bubbled into a brackish tumour that has metastasised to her throat; finding solace in the place where everything she had ever left unsaid came to die. Raum thinks he is the water to extinguish her fire, but he does not consider that, instead, it has always been her love for him that had smothered the brimstone in the pupils of her eyes and the enamel of her teeth. With the death of such a love, Rhoswen finds (with a bitter smile) that he no longer holds jurisdiction here: no influence, no impact. 

It is done. 

So she does not flinch when he rushes to her skin like a leech to blood; on the contrary, ashtray-silver eyes dare him to touch her, to lay a single shadowy finger on her aureate flesh -- so that she might burn him like a Salem witch at a stake she had fashioned long ago. There is no sting from the waspish hiss of his tongue as the rancor spurts forth, for Rhoswen does not know this man; he is not the blue-eyed boy she met under a starry ceiling -- he is not the father of her child -- he is not anything, to anyone, anymore.

"No, Raum, she is weak because she has your heart."

The ancient Solterran magic in her bones kindles and sparks like an open fuse, as she stalks even closer to obliterate what remained of the gap between them. She is close enough to smell Acton's blood, and though this had since transcended his death, it rings like a vow. May Caligo have mercy on his soul.

"Tell me, what is a father's love worth when his hands are stained by the blood of the mother?" 

RHOSWEN

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

When one was not born into silk and pearls, you appreciate it when you get it
 
His hatred is an ember that refuses to cool. He cannot contain it, it is an explosion ripping through him. It is a supernova rippling out, out. There will be no black hole to swallow everything when his ire is done. He will lay fragments into everything, pieces of himself that will grate and itch and sting like a splinter. And Rhoswen’s will be the worst of all.
 
Within him is black. All is full of ink as thick as tar and as vas as a cave.  Anything that falls into him would be lost.
 
His heart, his heart. Never is it mentioned, never has he thought of his heart and what place it might hold within him. Never has he been so sentimental to consider its health. But now he does. Now he feels its pestilence, its fetid wrongness. There is nothing of him in Sabine, nothing of Rhoswen either.
 
The fire-girl does not sway, not when he moves toward her with blood gleaming upon his skin and dead souls haunting his every step. He hears their cry, he sees Acton watching him. But oh, Raum saved him from this, from the danger of Day girls. He warned Acton once but the Magician did not listen. And he paid for it.
 
Each muscle is taught, each inch of him is rigid as a bowstring pulled tight. They say once a lion tastes blood it thirsts for it again and as Raum’s tongue wets, he knows what it is to be a lion. Rhoswen comes to him, a fire consuming all. She chokes him with acrid smoke, she burns him with the weight of their daughter and yet he stands, as if he were stone. But oh how he watches her, oh how he drinks in every piece of her and despises each one.
 
Was this what comes of love?
 
Yes. His heart is a fetid, diseased thing. It decays within his chest poisoning his blood with the bacteria of hatred and violence. Sabine stands as pure as a lily between them, so fragile, so white. Yet there is nothing weak of her. Raum’s black eyes, dim as ditchwater, regard Rhoswen with a bleak stare. “No, Rhoswen. Sabine is stronger than both of us.” And Raum holds on to that, by the gods he clings to it.
 
Then he moves, brushing past Rhoswen for the Steppe awaits. “I will not kill you, Rhoswen.” Raum says, as he stops, head tilting to speak back to her.  “Not today, at least.”
 
But as he steps away, as he leaves Rhoswen as she has left him so many times before, he knows he will destroy everything of importance to her. Then, Raum realizes, then he will return for her.

---

@Rhoswen <3