I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.
The worst part of it all is how, still, he does not take her seriously.
He does not shiver, he does not shake, nor look away: even pouring blood and gilt, foaming with rage, Bexley is not enough to impress him. It hurts her like nothing else he’s done. Why is she still no more than girl to the world after so much pain and suffering? Is that not how you become a woman? To know that after all this time, after all this insurmountable effort, all of Bexley’s power still does not make her tremble - almost she wants to scream at him, but bitterly she holds it back for fear of her throat fully rupturing.
Get out, he says, and Bexley heaves.
The pain is her stomach is horrible and nauseous and visceral. It sinks its claws into her until she thinks she might faint, until she can feel her weight shifting without aim or balance over her feet, and every muscle contracts and detracts with feverish delirium, but somehow she bites her tongue. (Whatever God is watching is doing so with rapt attention.)
She steels herself with a hard, horrible breath. Get out, Raum says, and Bexley knows, as much as she knows her own name, that someday soon Solterra will return Raum to her dead, and return her to the desert alive.
And that is called fate.
Bexley smiles at him as he turns, teeth slicked with dark blood. It pours into the back of her throat, a slough of salt and black and red, and patters against the sand and the curve of her hooves below her hung head.
Try, she snarls at him, and with a brief bare of her teeth turns back toward the edge of the desert to skulk away.
Not for long.
