[P] lacrimosa

[Rhoswen]

R H O S W E N It had been years since Rhos had prowled the plains of Eluetheria. Upon her travels between Solterra and Denocte, she'd had no reason to drift this far east toward Delumine - until now. Until the hands of time and fate had twisted the world into an unrecognisable painting with strokes of colour she could barely read. Dawn had begun to break overhead, brushing the muted blue sky with colourful promises of the coming day, and as the red woman traced a winding path carved into the ancient earth by generations of bison, she felt the memories unfolding like paper planes in the cortex of her mind.  Appearing first, pale and sure, was the desert queen she had left behind. Seraphina was a woman Rhoswen knew so little of, truly, but knew regardless that she would choose to trust her all the same. There were not many who might have won the respect and allegiance of such a spitfire - they instead have burned beneath her ire - but the child-solider-turned-empress was a creature of different ilk. There had been something measured in that steadying gaze, something bearing truth, and in Rhoswen's hour of need, Sera had been there. Rhos owed her the life of her child - could a stronger testimony exist? Feelings of uncertainty spread like ripples from a stone dropped in water: so many questions yet answered. Would the Sun queen trust her in return? Would she see past a heady girl's errors? Behind Seraphina there lurked a spectre, as wraithlike as the very mist that formed these visions in her mind. Blue eyes blinked; blue to drown the fire in her heart. Raum was an inescapable force that she had come to reckon with in more ways than one. How could she love someone as hard as this, and yet want, still, to rip him from her life like a plaster left too long on the skin. What was she hiding beneath that bandaid? A cut, a broken bone, a shard of shrapnel wedged deep into her flesh? Their affair had been wrought with complexity and conflict from the very first instance, culminating in bitter words and crimes she was working hard to unravel. A love like this was enough to shatter worlds. But Raum was not the last memory to spin like a bottletop round and round and round - there was another left to show its hand. One shrouded in a mire of guilt that Rhoswen had sidestepped for too long. Bexley Briar. She wondered what the scar looked like - whether it had altered her friend beyond repair. Was it bright and garish, or dark and ominous? Soon, the sun girl would see for herself. Her association with Acton's violation had born many sleepless nights, for there was something evil in the knowing - knowing she could have prevented this, and knowing her inertia had cost so very much.  At last, Rhoswen reached the highest point of the plain, coming to a halt upon the swelling ground. She was a flickering flame over a sea of grass, like gasoline upon an oil-slicked ocean - a ballerina lost behind swathes of auburn hair and sharp, sharp lines. She knew the Deluminian owl had reached Bexley, for it would not otherwise have returned so soon, but upon it's descent it had carried not a word of reply. Rhoswen had come to the halfway land between Dawn and Day all the same - she owed Bexley that much, and so here she stood - a sanguine sentry against the backdrop of a new sky.

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