All this bitterness between us feels like a million fractured bits of our hearts laid out on the ground instead of sand and stone. I wonder if my soul can hear the crack, crack, crack of it when I walk across the marble. Does the sulfur in the air hide the acid smell of it, or the dark flavor of fermented fruit instead of cedar smoke?
Does she not know how bitterness spreads like cancer into the marrow of our bones? Has she learned nothing?
I almost ask her as I pull back my magic and turn the sand to dandelion seeds that she will not know the meaning of. I almost say a million other things. But what comes out is, “of course,” in a sigh as tired as my bones who are only starting to learn the ache of immortality. “How could it not be when children will grow up never knowing the meaning of the word chain?” The smell of sulfur changes to brine when Fable settles his wings and his fury.
But I am not settled. Not at all. The bitterness, the fractured trail of my heart between us, has only risen that beast in my bones so close to the surface that I can hear it breathe.
It's whispering as my magic begs for her own. My wrath begs for her bitterness so that I might unmake this shallow world of Morrighan's thread by thread.
“Should I have let them all suffer with death the only relief? Do you think it would have been better to sit in my castle, with my city safe and warm around me, when I had power enough to save thousands?” There is no gentleness in my smile now, no love. There is nothing but teeth and fury enough to melt every bitter inch of ice in his world.
Show me your teeth Morrighan. I want to say. Show me your rage.
Dandelion seeds float up around us in clouds a million wishes we have forgotten about. I do not try to catch a single one. I do not watch them drift out over the sea and gather between Fable's scaled. Neither of us needs wishes, or seeds, or forgotten things.
“Has your world always been so small?” My soul can barely hear the fragments of us shattering beneath my steps as I move close enough for her to burn me. It hardly hears anything but that monster breathing just below my skin.
I wonder if it ever will again.
