At the name, Reichenbach, Bexley becomes as terrible as the sun. She glows, fierce and hot, wild with an anger that billows out like rippling heat. It scolds Florentine’s skin, drowning her in flame.
The Solterran girl is liquid gold and the Dusk girl turns to metal, statuesque, beneath Bexley’s onslaught. This sun girl is as unforgiving as the desert around them. Her reaction rips at Florentine’s heart as fiercely as the teryr ripped at Bexley. The flower girl’s heart hurts as brutally as the golden girl’s rend flesh.
The whistle, the agonising intake of breath, feels like universes colliding and through it all, should the worlds fall down around her, Florentine can do little but stand before this Solterran girl, taking each blow she delivers.
Solis help you. The words are a whip across tender, surprised skin, and Florentine feels the run of blood, trickling down her heart, flowing out through her soul. For all that she longs to, for all that her body and mind beg to, Flora cannot tear her amethyst gaze from the glassy blue of Bexley’s. Even in her fury Bexley is beautiful. In her rage that roars like a lion, savage and aggressive, oh, even then Bexley is beautiful!
The Night King. Flora closes her eyes against the words, against the betraying clench of her heart, her abdomen. There is a longing for him that she hates, what would she give right now to stop loving him? To be able to leave here with her heart full and untouched, unbroken, unscarred? To have returned to her the piece he took - the piece she fears she might never see again…
You can’t possibly expect that to work. Each word Bexley mutters is detached, flat, eerily calm. Yet they are the spark to Florentine’s gasoline and where once it had been Bexley who raged like wildfire, now she has lit the Dusk girl like a beacon.
Golden ears crash to her skull, tangling deep, deep down into flowers and honey hair. Flora’ eyes blaze more coldly than they ever have. Despite their truth, each of those words was agony to hear. Each word only locked the door to Reichenbach more firmly. It was something she should thank Bexley for affirming, yet the grief of that door shutting, of hearing the truth, You can’t possibly expect that to work, is destroying.
“I told him no!” The flower girl declares with a hiss so far from her voice of bells and petals. “I am not an idiot, Bexley.” A slender hoof slams into the dust. “He gave me a choice. He would have asked me to join him in the Night Court, if I had let him. I didn’t.”
The dusk girl, as bruised as the sky she lives beneath, looks away, across endless sands, across a kingdom where shadows are so rare, where darkness resides the least. Maybe she should live here? To be as far from the Night King that she can possibly get…
But oh to be close to him…
The tears come, hot and unbidden, slowly trickling down one cheek and then the other. They are silent, their paths hot and dusty. This girl is a fool. Florentine loved too hard, she loved too fast, too freely and now she faces loosing it all.
Bexley’s disgust, the tone of her voice is yet another lance to Florentine’s heart. Could Bexley hear the moment at which it shatters? Each piece so small she fears she might never patch them back together again.
“Do you think I chose to love him?” The girl says so quietly, ire slipping through her words like a blade. “You make it sound like he is the worst possible person to fall in love with. You know him well, so tell me, what is so terrible about Reichenbach?” Her eyes blaze, begging Bexley to tell her some terrible truth about his infidelity, about a terrible way he treats any he loves; anything to help her stop loving him.
@
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
