The world is warped by their chemical cacophony. The ground sinks a little beneath her hooves and the sky warbles a strange song of blue and white and blue again, until all she can hear is the hum of clouds passing overhead. At least it is a reprieve from the steady battle-beat of Raum's breath that assaulted the stratosphere above and beyond them. Rhoswen wonders (transiently, wearily) if the clouds had dreams of their own. If they longed to be emancipated from their deathless pilgrimage across earth's glass canopy; if they felt blood in their bleached formless lungs at the sight of the destruction unfolding miles below. She casts a lazy, scathing glance skyward as if to say, 'wanna swap? Yeah, that's what I thought', before reluctantly dragging her attention back to the Ghost.
Her rage is stagnant, it has bubbled into a brackish tumour that has metastasised to her throat; finding solace in the place where everything she had ever left unsaid came to die. Raum thinks he is the water to extinguish her fire, but he does not consider that, instead, it has always been her love for him that had smothered the brimstone in the pupils of her eyes and the enamel of her teeth. With the death of such a love, Rhoswen finds (with a bitter smile) that he no longer holds jurisdiction here: no influence, no impact.
It is done.
So she does not flinch when he rushes to her skin like a leech to blood; on the contrary, ashtray-silver eyes dare him to touch her, to lay a single shadowy finger on her aureate flesh -- so that she might burn him like a Salem witch at a stake she had fashioned long ago. There is no sting from the waspish hiss of his tongue as the rancor spurts forth, for Rhoswen does not know this man; he is not the blue-eyed boy she met under a starry ceiling -- he is not the father of her child -- he is not anything, to anyone, anymore.
"No, Raum, she is weak because she has your heart."
The ancient Solterran magic in her bones kindles and sparks like an open fuse, as she stalks even closer to obliterate what remained of the gap between them. She is close enough to smell Acton's blood, and though this had since transcended his death, it rings like a vow. May Caligo have mercy on his soul.
"Tell me, what is a father's love worth when his hands are stained by the blood of the mother?"
RHOSWEN
@Raum
