[AW] in dreams of darkest creation

[Rhoswen]

hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have Rhoswen could not remember all the ways she had felt pain in the short sharp chapters of a book (her book) still unwritten, but she knew - regardless - that it had been interminable. The memory of each stroke borne from the fibres of a hallowed-gold bullwhip lashing across her spine lived on in the hellish, hazardous realms of her mind. A divine castigation for all the crimes she had committed across chambered timelines and many amaranthine lives. Hell was not a threat Rhoswen feared, for there was no torment she had not already endured; be it at the hands of those she loved or the very moon under which her fate had been sealed. She had lost everything to that opaque lunar light: her brother, her daughter, her lover, her sanity. And what, then, was left? Like a wolf drawn to a sky-reaching bluff under the cover of darkness, Rhos had found herself almost entirely alone - almost. For no matter how hard she yearned for the sun's terrible grip, the red woman could not evade that gentle maternal embrace of the moon.  What did it feel like to harbour a rift within every tooth, filament and grain of your soul? Rhoswen knew, oh she knew.  "Rhoswen -" There was nothing that could startle the she-wolf now, but even as she stood on the very edge of oblivion Rhos knew she had not expected to share the dawn with the queen of old and new. Had she even expected to lay eyes on Seraphina again in this life? It was not a question she wished to answer. Dilated cosmic eyes sifted through the mist in search of the voice and it's mistress, succeeding with unsurprising efficiency. The Solterran Queen was both unrecognisable and unchanged. To Rhoswen, she was a tapestry. A monochrome canvas painted by callous fingers - hands owned by a general and a devil - and swathed in humble glory. The truth was that Rhoswen could not satisfy the pride she harboured for this woman she barely knew; it sickened and soothed her. The weight of her guilt felt somehow lighter under the sovereign's gaze, but the paradox of this truth brought only further anarchy to her blood and her bones.  "A long time ago, I thought I knew." She breathed, tongue rasping over the dry walls of her mouth. Rhoswen felt as though her hooves had sewn themselves into the very earth below, amalgamating with the clay and the rock and the roots of this cursed kingdom. "But I am not that woman anymore. Now, I am no-one and so I have nothing to seek." The silence that followed was bloodless and haunted by the gilded, fractured light that had risen up around their silhouettes. And then - "Seraphina, I don't want you to ever forgive me."

ooc -- two months later i'm so sorry, final year is kicking my butt @Seraphina

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