[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 blames him.
 
Oh how she does.
 
His sins are many but he is not responsible for Rhoswen fleeing, over and over and over. He listens and smiles. It is a thing seldom few have seen. For some it will be a shock. But for his daughter of butterfly ice, it will be memories made dark and twisted. There is no joy in his smile, there is no delight in abounding love that he had once felt. There is just sadness and a twist of resentment bitter as lemon.
 
“No Sabine.” He says quietly, yet those two words are hard as granite. They hem her in around and above and below. They force her to listen, to understand. “Even if she did leave, hoping that things would get better, how would it ever? She would leave when things were right and return licking at her wounds.”
 
All of Raum is soft now. All of him is quiet. Yet he is audible, even above the winds that howl around this high tower that cradles them within its core. He has ripped it open and the Solterran dust billows in to its chest cavity.
 
She is dead… where is the victory in that?
 
He says nothing, though he turns toward the throne room’s open wound with its jagged glass edges. He looks down from it to the ground where already the statue is swept away and the crowds pushed back. The Royal Guard look up, concerned, watchful, keeping the citizens away from the Mad King.
 
That is what they whispered on the streets, that is what they believed of him. Madness, a dictator… he was one of those things, but he was not mad. And maybe that is the worst of all his sins. “She is at peace now, Sabine. How is that not victory?” He moves toward her, closer and closer until he is a breath from her, until to touch his daughter would be the smallest move. He longs to, he desires to. Already the memory of her skin is fading, he tries to grasp the girl he holds within him mind, but she is water between fingers. Gone.
 
Their relationship is already broken… how could anything be worse when his daughter could not stand to be touched by him any more? “I came here to ruin her,” He confesses softly. “I came here to take the Court she loved above me and  above you and turn it into ash. Solterra was never a home to me but I have spent the most time here after Denocte. I hate this place, its people, its sun. It has taken everything from us and so I came to make it reap the rewards of it ambition. I came to make Rhoswen suffer.” He stops every word spoken softly, carefully, thoughtfully. “But she killed herself and now she is at peace and that, Sabine, is victory.”
 
Each word washes upon his daughter in a terrible baptism. He knows she might always be changed. He sees the light in her eyes go out, the man she remembered incomparable to the man she knows now. Ah, his daughter, the last creature alive to ever see him as lovable. He sees the moment he becomes less, the moment he becomes a madman in her gaze.
 
 Rhoswen is resting and gods he is so tired too. As if she knows Sabine says with promise, with prophetic certainty, and you are going to die soon too. His head lowers and turns away from the desire to touch his daughter one last time. To hold her, to whisper that he loves her, to press a kiss to the curve of her jaw and feel all the ways she is alive and breathing and the product of a love that once was pure and good.
 
But he doesn’t and he aches with it.
 
Raum turns to face the window, that gaping, open wound: a silent cry. “You are right.” He agrees softly, welcoming death in, feeling the cold of her and how his ghosts wear such awful macabre smiles. “I think it is time you left, Sabine. The guards will see you out.” 

He dismisses his daughter as a king and does not turn to see her leave.

---

@Sabine