This darkness, it has a name. I can make them pay.
Those words, those words so swathed in shadow and menace are spoken with a whisper and the innocence of a bitten lip. Flora’s eyes, as bruised purple as her heart, draw over Aislinn’s worried lip. They do not linger long, for they close beneath the force of such whispered words. They are spoken with the softness of a butterfly’s wings but make landfall upon Flora’s soul with the force of a hurricane.
Oh Aislinn could make them pay. Florentine would join her in every step. Riteousness would be theirs. In her chest, that fly-away heart of hers still stutters in shock. It still makes her veins thrum with nervous trembling and wild, savage fury. But above all, above the hum of her veins and the shaking of her heart, is the betrayal that is a crying slash across her face.
“Reich hypnotized me.” Now it is Florentine’s time to whisper. She whispers through the storm of her anguish and shame, and it leaves her raw and ragged. This girl is split so terribly open. “He made me tell him the truth.” Her voice is a bleat, and she feels like a lamb before the slaughter, but it was her own shame that held the blade. Oh Florentine does not even know if she is guilty of lying. She cannot even fully understand the truth that was forced from her tongue, from her soul. “He was jealous of what Lysander is to me...”
The Night King’s magic was a black, black thing. “I thought I knew him.” Dusk eyes close as Aislinn smoothed a tangled lock of hair from her face, securing it behind a golden, fluted ear. “I am sorry, Aislinn. I am sorry for everything he did, for everything we did to you…” She pauses, dragging in a breath, that swirls with snow and winter-night moans.
Her eyes lift, to meet blue, to sink into that endless sea until she is so deep it turns to black. “Is it terrible to want retribution?” Florentine seizes another breath but this is not so easy. A guilt fills her lungs with razors and oh the breath cuts her deep. “Reich and Isorath are in love.” Such small words trail off, swallowed by Calligo’s shadows, swallowed by snow and winds that refuse to be still. They snag in the girls’ hair and leave cold kisses along their cheeks.
“I do not know what to do Aislinn…” The curves, the lines, the gradients of this storm girl’s face are beautiful and wild and savage. She knows why her brother succumbed to such beauty. “I cannot trust him again and, because of that, I do not know what to say you should do. I fear it will only draw a line between our Courts.”
Snow, snow, snow, it is thick, it is a shroud, and it makes her feel more protected when she whispers to her storm singer sister. “I am scared to lose you too.”
@Aislinn - allll the confessions and weeping right now
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
