Regret is not an emotion I have ever been comfortable feeling. Apsara has told me stories of it from the walls and the silks to thread-bare to glitter in the sun. Mother has told me stories of it and they all had, there in the middle of them like a mortal wound, the question what if over and over again until those two little words, what and if swallowed up any other part of the story I might have remembered. Father has told me about regret too. I can see it in his gaze when he looks so long at the horizon that I know it’s not this world, our world, that he’s seeing but something else.
And I do not want to be wall, and silk, and a mortal wound, and a world outside this single one that I know.
So when regret comes, right as she keens like a dying star I forgot to bury a wish in, I try to shove it deep down where the fodder for my nightmares lives. I try to blink it away and see only the glory of the gore, of arrogance felled, of a lesson taught. I try to scratch it away as I step closer to Foras as he drops his muzzle in the attempt to worry at her spine like it’s only a corpse instead of a unicorn.
But it lingers just like the ache below my eye where she cut a scale out.
It lingers.
And lingers.
Foras snarls at the feeling of regret in my heart when I use it to collar him, to settle him, to turn his rage onto a bison wandering through the deep snow. Part of me hates that I felt the need to turn his rage onto anything else but this girl brave enough to look at the war in my eyes and answer with her own. In another world, on another shore, we might have been more than this. It is so much easier, in the end, to tear open the neck of an arrogant man who is as far from a unicorn as my heart is from the desert.
It’s all the things we could have been that I’m thinking off when I walk up to her and press my ear to the whimper of a roar in her chest. And it’s all the things that part of me still wants us to be that I’m thinking of when I use my horn to pick a scale from my knee.
I scrape it across her lips, hard enough that I can feel the hardness of her teeth against my horn. “Next time,” I pull my horn away so that we might meet sea-eyes to blood-eyes. “just ask for one.” Regret is still blooming like a lotus flower in my heart as I turn away.
But I do not let myself look back.
@Isolt
