[Judged] I think my fate is losing its patience;

[Bexley]

Fight Type: Battle
Prize: EXP
Contact Made: Yes!

Character #1: @Bexley
Bonded: N/A
Magic: Periti level Light Manipulation
Armor: N/A
Weapons: N/A
Current Health: 30
Current Attack: 30
Current Experience: 55

Character #2: @Seraphina
Bonded: Ereshkigal, Demonic Vulture
Magic: Periti level Greater Telekenesis
Armor: Leather face and chest plates and front leg wraps, golden hood (not sure if she's wearing it right now?)
Weapons: Alshamtueur, flaming sword
Current Health: 17
Current Attack: 23[/font][/size]
Current Experience: 61

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BEXLEY BRIAR

but if i gave up on being pretty,
I wouldn’t know how to be alive

The sun splits a perfect day in half. It’s spring again. The clearness of the new sky and the warm breeze winding over the dirt are like a clean, bright candy on the tongue. Across the steppe, Bexley can see a shadow, dark and clean against the yellowish horizon: she watches and does not flinch.

Even if she were scared, and she’s not—she’s not—what is there left to lose?

Bexley’s life is practically over, and the lives of everyone she loves. What can she do about it? They are all powerless against Raum’s military regime, next to nothing in the face of his soldiers and swords. (She sees his face in her sleep and tears it apart, sets it on fire, buries it deep. But no matter what he comes back to haunt her, all quicksilver skin and cornflower eyes. Most of the time, at least; his strange magic made it all the more confusing—)

He should be dead by now. Seraphina should be queen, and she and Eik should be regent and emissary. She should… she should know where her daughter is. And she should be living in her towers like a person, not scrounging around the desert in search of somewhere to sleep, using her magic to keep herself warm while the scum of the earth sits on the Solterran throne.

All this should, and none of it feasible. It makes her sick.

The heat of the sun bakes the steppe, and in pursuit of summer, thin, lengthy cracks spread through the wine-red dirt. The web is complex and overlapping, like the veins in a pretty piece of marble. Bexley shifts her weight over her feet in a test. The ground holds, though not without a little displacement, and she lets out a slow breath of relief.

The shadow on the horizon grows larger, closer. Bexley’s nerves start to tighten against waves of adrenaline. Her heart speeds its thump in her chest. All at once she feels both very small and very large, very angry and very much in love, and the magic heat that washes over her is so potent and so gold it almost knocks her off her feet, almost, almost.

But she is not a girl anymore, and this is no time to learn weakness.

“Seraphina.”

It’s not loud enough to carry, but even using the name feels like committing a crime, burning a brand of guilt onto her tongue. Bexley’s pulse swells. (Desert laws reign supreme to her, even all the way out here.)

The sun blinks overhead through a thin lace of clouds, and Solterra’s no-longer-golden girl slashes her tail behind her like a ribbon dancer. Her blood hums with alternating hot and cold, fear and excitement; she pulls the magic that roars through her into a fist, barely contained, and waits.

Her life recently has felt like a singular command: stay. Who is she to argue with God?

x