As a girl she'd had a vision of what her life might be: gold wings, white teeth, too-hot light -- but it could never have been this. This. Mother had always told her of the darkness that would come, and come, and never stop coming and with a resignation that punched steam from her violent veins, Rhoswen knew she had been right.
She stood now in a trance that was almost narcotic: staring out across earth's mirror until the horizon became one with the sky. A songbird painted it's cardinal dance upon a cloudless canvas, looping higher with each thrust of its small, strong wings, and Rhoswen wished, prayed, that it might take her hand and lead her away from the black grin of hell.
Raum's form seemed to blur and shift, as though some great god had smudged his skin into the very landscape. But what did vision matter when the sound of their souls colliding sent cracks of celestial thunder rupturing beneath noon's high sun? It was a cataclysm. It was ruin. It was grief and death and the end of all things.
Rhoswen thought her skin might shatter like glass to reveal all the flowers she had once grown for Raum: daffodils and hydrangeas and foxgloves that had since wilted into the hollows of her despair. For him, she had been a greenhouse. Now she was but a tomb. Yet she does not break, for tombs are made not of glass but of ore and stone and metal: she was a mausoleum ready to shed flowers long-dead so that she might harbour his corpse instead.
The ghost spoke of Acton, of Isra, of Seraphina -- each name leaving a notch upon her heart until there was not an inch of red flesh that was not marked by those who had suffered at his hand. Acton, Isra, Seraphina. The red woman felt a snarl coil at the back of her throat, but she knew better than to satisfy Raum's dark gluttony, and so she simply stared back into his savage eyes until she thought her gaze might blind his own.
There was nothing to stop him now. Nothing but perhaps the child they had brought into this bleak black world. Would he snuff the light out of their daughter's eyes, too?
"Sabine will never forgive you for what you have done," her voice is fire and blood, "and if I am sure of anything, it is that you will die knowing you were the one to break her weak little heart."
RHOSWEN
