Time is slow and creeping while Marisol thinks, realization, sympathy, a new understanding of what prison life might be like dawning in those sea-dark eyes. She is drowning in the thought of confinement, of isolation, of never being able to touch the sky even when you can smell it on a stiff breeze and oh it should hurt. Dalmatia would wear on her mottled maw a sneer, a smirk, a fierce sort of scowl admitting that she's survived, she's made it after all these years left to rot. But she does not.
The ex-vicarious does not even flinch when the new Commander comes back to the present and looks at her with a new sort of pity, a new sort of fierceness. But it is not a promise that she would not be returned. Dalmatia sees that and her mind rebels at the thought, hisses like a snake inside at the mere suggestion of having to return to this dungeon. It is more a grave for a winged beast than even the bottom of the sea would ever be. All this is hidden, all this does not show when she speaks to her once-pupil. When she bares her barbaric grin. Before, perhaps, she may have grunted or huffed in amusement. There is none of that now.
The water that ran down her spine and tapped along her hips for so many years left no room for laughter in her bones. It hollowed them out, washed them in salt, and turned her out into the world as something entirely new and different than the woman she'd been going into this prison.
Guards step back as Marison leads her into the light at last. Dalmatia does not care to answer, does not even notice that she does not. There is no need, not when her hip brushes against the queen's familiarly, just as it once had years and years ago on the way to the sparring rings.
Now, the blood that would coat Dalmatia would not be her pupil's from a hard day of training. Now, the knife that is twisted would not be made of wood.
Now, she is a free corpse walking.
Now, she is an animal and her name is revenge.
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
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