[P] When Tides are Low

[Marisol]

 who's the fool who wears the crown?

The guards are watching. Their eyes are narrow and dark, nothing more than stones in the wet, empty cavern. Marisol knows she is righteous; she knows, even if she weren’t, that she is their queen, and they have no right to stop her from doing this. 

Key in the lock. Door opening.

They don’t stop it from happening. They don’t even try. And Marisol should know better, but some part of her is disappointed that these men, weapons slung on their back, brawnier and taller than she is, don’t even ask what it is that she is doing, or why. Some part of her is even afraid. What if it were someone else with the same confident walk? What if it were a silver-tongued liar with the right ring of keys? Would the guards stop them?

Or would they just watch, exactly like they’re doing now, as Terrastella’s longest prisoners and best-kept secrets steps from her cell?

Marisol’s chest is tight as she steps back. There is pressure building in her lungs, wave after wave of crashing saltwater sloshing around inside her chest. When Dalmatia steps into the narrow, wet hallway, Mari doesn’t know what to do, what to think, what to apologize, or even if she should. She is knocked completely senseless by the novelty of seeing the ex-Vicarius without a tattoo of bars between them; she is heartbroken and overwhelmed by the smell that follows her, seaweed and black mold and, somehow, the smell of time. The smell of months and years having been lost to her little cell, where the sun can hardly reach.

Something in her is grinding and shifting and slipping out of place. She feels unbalanced, paralyzed in the middle of a motion she can’t complete or even put a name to. They are standing so close that Marisol can see the frost of ocean-water on her prisoner’s eyelash, and all the knots in her dark hair, and the lines of salt that have crusted white down her neck and the slope of her shoulders. Again, Mari realizes with dread: time has passed. They are both old. Once this was a woman she looked at like a god, a person whose approval she craved with the intensity of an addiction. Once this was a woman strong with youth. Once she was unkillable, unforgettable, known for her power.

But time has passed. Marisol might be the only one her age who even remembers the ex-vicarius. Time has passed, and now they are evenly matched; she is nearly the age Dalmatia was when she was taken away. Now they stand and look at each other in bodies that both ache with stress and the weight of past years, standing at the same height, the same wingspan, looking at each other with the same tired eyes.

Now time is running out. 

Marisol bites her lip. She tastes blood, or maybe it's just the sea, wafting up the cliffside in all its shades of salt and iron. In a voice that shakes and growls like a storm, she says: 

"Prudence is back."

"Speaking."

credits