[P] oath

[Sabine]

s a b i n e you are a garden  that will one day bloom Her words sink into the heavy silence like bodies fastened to stone. She feels them drop, dragging her with them as, lazily, they meander down toward a watery grave. I don't know.  She's never known much. Her childhood was a brume of unanswered questions and unfamiliar faces staring at her from behind dark windows. Denocte had never felt like home; her uncle (gold and ochre) had been too absent to police his people and they filled the hollow space he left behind with tongues that lashed and stung. Their whispers carried too far and too quick for her father to soften their sting and when she tried to sleep the sadness from her bones, their warbling outrage seemed to lift only higher. "Ungodly creation" "A brat of Solterra, here?" "Her treacherous mother should-"  The disorientation, the loneliness, the unadulterated shame: that is what she remembers of Denocte.  But her father! Oh, her father.  He had been every glittering, dying star in her sky. He could not take away her suffering, but he could bury her in a love, so wide and so high, that she might know a place in her heart to escape from the pain. As a little girl, she had marvelled at the long lines of his face and thought to herself that he must have been a king in his past life.  The irony is not lost on her now.  For as they stand, locked in a ritual she could not bear, Sabine knows that the place he had created for her (the haven to which she ran when the monsters came hunting) was gone.  He is at her side in a blink of an eye and she is drowning in the smell of his skin. It is a sickness in her senses, poisoning her lungs, for it is him and not him, all at once. The rich redolence of blood and death that lies on his flesh like a glutinous film is overwhelming -- suffocating, but it cannot conceal the woody, resinous trace that remind her of the pines standing guard at the base of the Arma.  She wants to weep. There is a great animalistic sob beating at her chest, crying to be set free, and for a moment she almost turns the key. But when he pulls her close, she knows -- like she knows the simplest of truths -- that she cannot unravel now.  For a moment, Sabine leans closer. Why? Muscle memory, loneliness, grief - love; does it really matter? It is feels like a photograph, a precious second captured; one that would live in the space beside her heart, where her father's sanctuary should have been. And for that single moment, nothing else exists; they are alone in their sins and together in their grief. But it does not, cannot, last long. There is too much time between them; time that was replete with the souls he had stolen. And when she steps back, it is not to flee or to flinch from his touch. It is not to punish him like a child, or a murderer. It is to save him the only way she knows how.  "Do not apologise to me, Papa." She is trembling, but her gaze stands ferociously steady. "You -" A pause. Pained, wounded. "You should apologise to Acton who lies dead beneath flowers. You should apologise to his daughter for denying her the love of a father," her voice cracks, but she does not stop, "You should apologise to Isra who bears the scars of your torment. To Seraphina for leaving her to die alone in the sand. To the people of Solterra for crucifying their love of a God who is not your own. To Rhoswen... for taking everything she was and destroying it because you were angry." She is breathless, she is burning, "I do not think you will tell me why, and even if you did, it would never be enough. So let me ask you, Raum," she steps closer, so close that they are almost touching again, "was it all worth it?"

art created by rhiaan

@Raum