[SWP] pushing yesterday's streams

[Marisol]

THE ARCHIATER.

The version of Marisol that lands on the parapet might really be God: rain-slick, dark-eyed, spattered with blood.

The crash of hooves against stone echoes through the rain and seconds later the Commander emerges from the mist. Her dusky skin shines with an oil-slick of water from two days’ downpour; her short-cropped hair bristles against the curve of her neck, where her head is bent to her chest; on her legs run translucent rivulets of mixed rain and blood, leftover ichor from the bodies she’s picked up in the gutters, the scurrying animals she’s accidentally crushed underfoot, the injured, drooling degenerates she’s let lean against her side on their way to the Hospital. (The macabre part of her enjoys that irony - the Hospital being uncovered just before this cataclysmic flood, like it’s been waiting all this time for enough blood to make it worth opening.)

Asterion and Theodosia are already waiting, and she catches the tail end of their conversation as she draws close, wings pressed close to her side to let silver water drip off the brackish feathers. Any other time she might’ve flinched to see the two of them together (when Asterion’s purple-washed skin and Theodosia’s violet eyes are both annoyingly well-equipped to make her pulse flare and stomach turn), but now is not the time to think of such things. Sir, Mari repeats, and the word oozes with satire; the look in her eyes is equal parts anger and amusement, and it burns against Asterion. Didn’t we just decide we weren’t old quite yet?

Marisol flashes the Regent a faint, faint smile, a jolt back to their last meeting. It drops away as quickly as it came, and then she is steel and ice again, jaw clenched, eyes flint-hard, dark lips downturned into a vague frown, and when she speaks her voice is a guttural sound, ragged and utterly exhausted. All of Terrastella is flooded, and the field is filled with sinkholes. More than a few have fallen in already. But it seems that the Court itself isn’t much safer…

She glances over the edge of the parapet and into the court, watches the cobblestone streets and heavy-windowed buildings, how they glisten with grime and still-pouring rain.

@Random Events