[P] When Tides are Low

[Marisol]

 who's the fool who wears the crown?

Marisol’s heart hurts. It is tight as a fist in her chest; the beating is constricting, blood is failing to move through her body. The wind is beating and beating and beating at the rocks. It is a bitter thing, cold and sharp with salt, howling off the water with a tongue sharp like a wolf’s. Marisol’s eyes are stinging as she picks her way down the cliffs, and she is not sure whether it is the cold, or the breeze, or the way everything in her smarts like an open wound.

She hates this place with all her heart.

She hates the darkness and the dampness of it; she hates the eerie silence, cut open only by the ocean wind, the sound of breathing; she hates the way it makes her feel, headachey and sinus-stuffed, like crying, because despite her stone eyes and steel skin, this is the part of her that has been left soft. 

The part that cries about injustice. The part that stings at even a faint touch. The part that knows the word unfair and weeps for it, drained by the dark eyes of the prisoners and the cold faces of the dungeonmasters, destroyed by the knowledge that he is part of this: the salt-rusted cell bars, the lonely, desperate criminals, the fact that they spend their days locked up here with nowhere to look but out.

The fact that she has left her own Vicarius in the cliffsie, presumably to rot.

Marisol swallows thickly. Her jaw aches, a dull pain. The path is slippery and narrow, pockmarked with sea-smooth pebbles, hardly wide enough to keep a body balanced—but she walks it with practiced confidence, nimble, careful, a path she walks often and never without a heavy dose of dread. Her heart is sinking and sinking. She is rooted to the rock, paralyzed even as her body manages to move, even as she slinks out of the gray sunlight into the cold, dank prison.

She inhales. The smell of seaweed. Of sweat, of the incoming tides. It is dark in here, dimly-lit as always, and the guards have learned not to acknowledge her arrivals, so Marisol merely brushes past them with a curt nod and sidles her way deeper into the prison. 

Toward the cell of the woman she’s not sure belongs here anymore.

Dalmatia is older now, but still beautiful. in a way Marisol does not see on many other people. Time has turned her green eyes dull as stones, her hair is matted now by years of salt and wind; when Marisol sees her, her large, curled ears are almost always pinned back, which, under the circumstances, is… understandable. But she is still pretty. Elegant, dark, with fine bone structure.

The kind of woman who shouldn’t be in here.

Marisol takes a key off the ring. The guards turn to look at her, and they stare with silent, judging eyes.

"Speaking."

credits