even after they have been stepped on
She makes small talk, as they walk through the woods together, the trees guiding him. With each step his heart begins to tighten, with every whispering tree they pass he sees more and more shadows where before he had seen only sunlight. They feel like an omen; the forest feels like it is hiding a secret from him. So he is thankful for the distraction.
“My name is Ipomoea,” he tells her, trying to ignore the way his throat constricts around the words, choking him. “It is lovely to meet you, Corrdelia - I only wish it was under better circumstances.”
But the distraction is fleeting, because all too soon they reach the copse, and the secret he knew the trees to be hiding becomes all too clear.
He knows, in the same cold and terrible way by which the trees are pulling their roots away from the tainted soil around that corpse, that they are too late.
He knows the crow is dead. And he knows the hollow look in Corrdelia’s eyes as she looks upon the remains of her bonded. His own heart beats painfully slowly, like it, too, has forgotten how to beat with a piece of his soul missing, like the reopening of his own wound is draining the blood from his veins. He wonders, distantly, numbly, if the trees would pull their roots away from his blood, from his body, if he were to die in these woods. Perhaps a stone death was a mercy after all.
Ipomoea lingers near the trees as Corrdelia steps forward, one shoulder pressed against a birch to hide the way he trembles like a leaf caught in a storm. The pain is too familiar, too sharp and dreadful; the forest presses in around him, the trees are suddenly too close. He wants to run, to forget this forest and all the dark secrets it hides; and yet he stays frozen, as immobile as the trees, rooted to this spot and his memories.
His heart starts to race again; the tremble he tries to hide shivers down his spine.
And when a flower presses against his ankle in comfort, he crushes it beneath his heel.
“I’m sorry.”
His voice is as dry and paper-thin as the bark sloughing from the birch trees. He knows the words wouldn’t, couldn’t make a difference to her; how could they? There was nothing in the world to replace what had been stolen from her, this he also knows.
Bile rises again in the back of his throat, his stomach twisting itself around a knife of guilt. But with it, too, rises the anger that is now almost-familiar - how long, he wondered, how long would the forest bleed, how long would a murderer leave bodies like gruesome presents between the trees? It was starting to feel like he was allowing this to happen; by not catching the poachers, by always being one step behind them, Ipomoea was the reason the cycle continued.
Despite the blood, despite the smell of death and rot hanging thickly in the air and making his lip curl, he steps forward. Too-quick steps bring him to Corrdelia’s side, where he leans against her. Too long, too long, too late, his heart thumps out a mantra in his throat.
“Don’t look,” he says hoarsely, “it’s better to remember her as she was.” He doesn’t know if he believes himself, if he would listen to his own words if their places had been reversed. He still keeps the stone remainder of Odet on his desk; still looks at him every day when he rises. And yet a stone seemed less permanent, less real, than the mangled body they look upon now.
“I don’t know who did this,” his voice wavers, and the trees seem to shudder and whisper we know, we know, oh we know- “But I will find out. I will find them for you.”
And they will pay, for Hāsta, for all their sins, he doesn’t need to say.
@corrdelia
sorry for the wait!
