[P] lacrimosa

[Rhoswen]

R H O S W E N 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

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