[P] oath

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 


She trails in his shadow, his gaunt, dark daughter. If he looked closer, if he dared, he would see the darkness that lingers in the corners of her. It is darkness that makes her body out of furrows and lines, sharp angles and sharper joints. He has placed such darkness upon her and maybe he sees it, but he sees it on everyone his violence has touched. His reign is made of impoverished angles and fearful stares from wide, terrified eyes. Why would he ever notice one small girl in his sea of oppression?
 
Sabine is small in the grand chamber of his throne room. She is a struggling flower, wilting, parched beneath the golden sands and towering pillars of Solterra. He looks to her and knows that this is never where she was meant to be. Raum looks to her and knows why he has never spoken of her – to keep her safe, to keep her well. But she is here now and he is here and time has woven a long tapestry between them. It has painted them each in new, different colours, their backgrounds, their essences, nothing like they once were. Sabine is nothing like he remembers.
 
He looks to her limb. He looks for the blade he gave her, he looks for the fighting muscle he and Acton worked to put on her. But there is nothing, she is as sharp as a mountain range. His Sparrow is gone. Like the Magician, like…
 
She flinches, recoiling back, flitting away like a bird on the wind. His lips are poison and through blue eyes he watches her. Static hisses in that gaze, the warning echoes of the thousand souls he has sent to perdition. Sparks grip along her skin, as if the blue of him can hold her, as if the waters of his gaze are enough to rise and keep her. But the space between them aches, his gut twists and his skull tilts, corvid and wicked bright as he studies her.
 
“Don’t turn from me Sab-“ Raum goes to plead, to command, to reprimand her but she is speaking. No, she is bleating yet each word that comes from her lips is a shout, a strike, a stoning. No, they are sparks. Sparks that blaze and rage. Together they grow and catch the tinder of his heart. It is a fire she awakens, a wicked burn that melts the ice from his soul.
 
Rhoswen.
 
Dead.
 
Killed herself.
 
Over that girl’s death Raum would end the world and bring vengeance upon the one who took her. She was his, Rhoswen, that creature of fire and sun. She was his to destroy, his to keep. There is ash upon his tongue and in his heart. The world is suddenly empty, it echoes in fire and clatters with cold. In the winter of it, in this frigid, silent cold of Sabine’s revelation a letter falls. It smokes still – and likely would forever. The air smells of unearthly fire, dangerous magic that singes along the leaf of parchment.
 
The king snatches it up from where it floats like a lost soul. He reads and he reads and he reads.
 
There is nothing in him. He thought he was empty, he thought he was numb. But that was before Rhoswen, that was before she ripped herself from the space she made within his body. And now he is empty. Now he is cloven in two. He is ragged and hollowed and there is a yawning hole within him. Acton rattles like bones within it, but Rhoswen turns that cave into a chasm.
 
Sabine is breathing, she is echoing the freight train of her revelation. Her sides are heaving and oh, now he sees the darkness in her - that ink stain of his sin that mars everyone he meets. Has Rhoswen scrubbed herself clean now? Was her suicide enough for that? Now he looks upon their daughter and sees Rhoswen, only Rhoswen, forever Rhoswen.
 
The Ghost turns away, walks to the window and looks out across his lover’s court. He came to ruin her, to ruin them, to ruin everything that she loved. But she won, she won, she won. He is alone, a broken half of a whole. The place where she should be (every inch of him) is filling with hot, hot blood. And now he is hurting. Now those rent pieces of him are aching white hot and raw. It is a swelling, a building, a rising crescendo of desolate agony and no longer does he hear his daughter’s voice as ragged as the pieces of him. No longer does he see her, not when everything is black and raw. It is ash and blood and bitterness.
 
Raum turns from the window and twists suddenly, swiping a statue of Solis from its plinth. He throws it, and sunlight pours along its edges, drips down the length of its bent limbs, frozen in a rear, frozen in a glorious bend that arcs through the air into the window. The panes shatter in a juddering crash, enough to rattle him, enough to rattle his daughter too. The statue continues down, down, down obliterating upon the courtyard as white dust plumes up, up, up. A soul escaping, a magic released – is that how Rhoswen went too? Or is she ash upon the wind?
 
Shards rain in a curtain of glittering light upon the throne room floor. The glass is screaming, echoing off the pillars, following the statue down, down, down. The throne room resounds, trembling with a scream that goes on and on long after the glass has fallen silent, long after the splinters of stone have stopped skittering. The scream strangles into a cry, into a hot, harrowing sob.
 
One moment?
 
Two?
 
A day?
 
A year?
 
A millennia?
 
How long does he stand there? How long does that sob cling to the broken parts of a man falling apart?
 
He turns from the window but he does not see, not for the tears that stream, not for the blood that mingles with it, stinging in his eyes, gnawing in his heart. A thousand cuts litter the silver of his skin. Sabine thought he was a monster as she followed him into the throne room. She thought she saw fire in his eyes and darkness, darkness, darkness.
 
She thought.
 
She thought.
 
She thought.
 
Laughter comes, low and agonized. It claws its way along the walls between the king and his daughter. It crawls across his flesh and hers and writhes in the emptiness of him. Raum lifts his gaze from the parchment, smoked and now bloodstained. He looks to his daughter through terrible eyes, black as the deepest, heaviest ocean. His eyes are tar and they hold her tight as they bear down, crushing, wounding. His smile is nothing like it was. The edges Sabine made soft, are now a slash, finely cut and wicked as a blade. Darkness oozes over that black, black smile: bitter, fetid, furious. Grief becomes anger and oh her letter is a bellows to the flames of his ire. For all he burns he rages because no fire will ever be Rhoswen’s, no fire will ever be equal to hers.
 
He steps to his daughter a torturer, a murderer, a Villain King. That water is rising, rising within him. Where is his girl and her fire to balance him? There is no check upon him. Where is the sun to his night? He stalks to their daughter; the evidence of their love, the evidence of their failure. “And so, Sabine-” Raum begins, towering before her, haloed by the jagged, broken teeth of the window’s gaping maw. The Crow sees her trembling, trembling, he tastes their grief, the discordant song between them. It is the sound of a string pulled tight, tight, tight and made to sing. It is the sound of his heart breaking. It shudders in the space between them. He wilts, his tears, Rhoswen’s tears are dark tracks cutting through his silver skin. They split him open: his daughter, his lover, they break him…
 
Low, low, rubbed raw with a grief as coarse as sand, he asks, “- have you come to save me, or hate me?”
 
In all his grief, in all the weakened, broken parts of him, softened by Sabine and sorrow, violence stirs, slipping like gasoline in his veins, waiting for a spark, a spark, a spark.

---

@Sabine