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
