the sun shines low and red across the water,
This is the moment, that pivotal moment, where girls decide to be something worse than holy.
Avesta comes to the decision no less suddenly than all the young, feral hearts before her. Like a wave, like a tide, like an arrow made of moonlight, it rushes over her and through her. It tastes like freedom, and religion, and the sweetest sort of horror. The heat of it, the gore, runs through her blood with a feeling not unlike her mother's chain-mail pillows when she slumbers upon then. She relishes it, she welcomes it, she says a prayer to it with every violent part of her sea-stained soul.
And so she becomes it. All at once she becomes it.
This time when she lays her horn on the ground that has once more tripped her sister, the touch of bone to loam has nothing to do with magic. It has everything to do with promises, with marks that live long past the death of a soul. Her mind, her thoughts whisper to the loam and the garden. I will consume you.. Avesta is done with this earth, with the way it whispers to her sister of the past like it loves her. She might be young but she knows this is not love, this is teeth at your jugular pretending to be a poem instead of a death. And she knows that she must consume the world, devour it, take it, make it bend, so that it won't devour her perfect sister whole.
One of them was fated to be wrong, there is too much sea and magic running through their blood for them to be right. And this is the moment. This is the moment. This is the moment. She is all the terrible parts of her mother who was in the maze when someone died, and this is the moment.
“You are never to be sorry again.” There is only sharpness in her voice, only the echo of that same ancient thing that is opening up in girl and wolf. Her words make her feel like she has a mouthful of bones, and each one is sharper, older than the last. She feels like a thing unleashed, like Fable is not the real ruler of the sea. She is, she is, she is and this is the moment.
Avesta turns towards Morrighan, and inhales her char and her smoke. She inhales it and lets her heart, her blood, her horror make another promise. Always now it's going to be promises with her, pounds of flesh that she's hoarding like grain in the winter. Her mouthful of bones wants to shape itself into words, into weapons, into things more dangerous than her voice when she says, “We did not need you to tell us that.” And in the flash of her eyes there is the suggestion that soon, someday, there will be nothing more dangerous in the word than her.
At her side Foras growls low and pulls back his lips in a way that fills his look with more bones than flesh and teeth. This is his moment too, the darkness and the screams calling to him in the same way a dark wood calls to a normal wolf. This is his wild, his law, his religion. This is his freedom and he takes it just like Avesta is deciding that she will take everything else.
Morrighan steps closer to her sister who is still struggling with her sobs despite the way she's happy to tilt her horn towards the screaming center of the maze. But Avesta isn't looking at the maze anymore, or the corn bent back around her like disciples. She is only looking at Morrighan when she puts her body between her sister and the Warden. Foras has not settled and neither will she.
And the tilt of her horn, in the way of unicorns and girls counting the world by the weight of its flesh, says this is mine.
This is the moment.
@
