[P] perennial quiet

[Marisol]

watch the world go by, dreaming /
blood-red dreams of pretty women

Mari feels… small.

There are two inches between them, barely notable at all; but she feels the difference keenly, and the bother she feels at it is less a sharp prickle than a dull, gnawing ache. It weighs on her. It pulls on her shoulders, and she puts effort into keeping herself tall and rigid. 

Marisol has seen enough of the world to know that his height, in itself, means nothing. (If it came down to it, she thinks, he would not present much of a problem. Tall or not.) She has taken down monsters and warriors double her size. She has seen kid-sized cadets beat their sparring partners into the ground—sparring partners taller, heavier, sometimes even more experienced. But this is a different feeling. Far closer to frustration than to fear. It’s not about whether he could defeat her—he couldn’t—or even catch her if she tried to dodge him in a spar. 

It’s about the power. The feeling that already lives inside of her of being inferior, of being unqualified: of being a small girl, a queen on a chessboard that is far too big for her to traverse properly, a board filled with sovereigns and regents that all loom over her, and—

It is that feeling. That feeling of being loomed over. Marisol’s jaw grits. She blinks once; long, tense, slow.

It is that feeling that sits deep inside her and does not move, does not flinch, but is only lodged further and further into the pit that is her heart and stomach when she hears him speak. 

When he looks at her, he is wearing strange mix of composure and forced relaxation that Marisol recognizes intimately. On someone else it might disarm her; on him, it is almost irritating. Wouldn’t you rather be the Sovereign who took precautions, than the Sovereign who didn’t? Marisol can’t help the barest flinch. And when he dares to smile—oh, that digs into her, claws and teeth, until her eyes narrow and her jaw seems to ache. 

“I don’t need you,” she says softly, icily, “to tell me what kind of Sovereign I would rather be, Lyr. You are the son of a monk. yet you seem to have forgotten: it is Vespera who commands me, no one else.”

A beat. Marisol lets out a short huff of breath. “I agree. We should be careful. Wars begin easily. But you understand—being given this position does not guarantee you any special treatment. There are… rules.”

There are always rules. There are only rules, Marisol thinks—rules to hold the world together, and a few to break it apart. 

Hers will not be the latter.


“Speaking.”

credits