[P] come home to my heart

[Bexley]

I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.

God is dead.

Bexley has never been a pious girl. No more than anything needed to keep her from ostracization. But God is dead and she feels it like a bullet feels the barrel of a gun. And -

A girl told her. In the markets. Yesterday. Or the day before?

Anyway it had been recent. Anyway she hadn’t expected it. Anyway, she had been perfectly fine searching the stalls for scythes, drowning in cinnamon a little worried but not more than normal, given the present climate, and the girl had come up to her, and Bexley could remember thinking she was a little too young to be out on her own but had especially pretty, dark eyes. Not thinking anything of her except that she might also be in want of a weapon. But she had paused, strangely, like she was on the edge of something, a sentence, or a warning, before meeting Bexley’s eyes. Quiet and uncertain as a feather floating through air. And she had said “_____ is dead. Do you know?”

The name did not quite make sense to her. Like the girl had spoken it in a language from a foreign island. Or replaced it with a completely black noise, impossible though that was, a noise that meant nothing but dark and dark and more dark. It was incomprehensible. Even Delphic. She could not even be sure the word that the girl had said was made of letters and not numbers, or glyphs. Bexley heard  ______  and could not really process it, even when the girl repeated it, because it both was and wasn’t a name, and was and wasn’t a prayer, and even if she was saying the name Bexley thought she might be saying, it couldn’t possibly be true, because she had just seen him - she had just seen him.

She wouldn’t have even believed it, if not for the next thing the girl said, which was “I’m sorry.”

That she understood.

Bexley had opened her mouth, she remembered it, feeling salt flood her tongue, and her throat close, and did not even know what she could possibly say except that she had to say something, only then she blinked and it was gone, it being everything, all gone, and she was standing somewhere else entirely, in a slightly different variation of the universe, and the girl had disappeared, and the stalls, and the scimitars, and could not remember how she had gotten there, or when, and knew nothing except that God was dead and that the moon was now shining overhead. Starlight poured into the streets. And the Citadel rose up in front of her too tall, like a bird almost taking flight. She had not been here just a second ago, she had been all the way on other side of the city, and would have thought it was a dream except for the way she recognized the scattered film of moonlight webbing the cobblestone.

And it was fall - right? - and she would have been cold, she knew, if she could feel anything at all, but the wind is buffeting the shadow at the end of the street, not her, and the silver is streaming onto the girl far, far away, not her, and she does not feel anything at all, only watches. And watches. Sandstone buildings tower around them. Solterran flags, mottled now by dirt and ash, flutter pathetically in the meek wind. It is utterly silent except for Bexley’s pulse beating against the inside of her head and the soft whoosh of air passing through the open windows of the apartments. And this girl, the foreign body, the utter stranger, wearing her skin and her scar and her necklace, looks at her and disappears around a corner and Bexley wants to follow but she -

Blinks, and here she is. In a night again, though it can’t possibly be the same one. The endless miles of the Mors stretch out around her in peaks and troughs to the edge of the world. The moon has waxed into an improbably fat first quarter.

_____ is dead, she says out loud. The stars sneer overhead. They drape the desert in shadow.

It would not matter so much if she had not been much more pious than expected, if she had not loved him, if they had made any sense together at all - then they could have died happy, if that was a way to die at all - and yet there is not a tombstone in the world engraved DIED HAPPY.

So the scar on her cheek becomes a kind of gift. It pulses, like a heartbeat, against the bone-white skin. And it is so awfully and so his and so awfully real that she feels one of her knees give out (sweet irony!) and nearly crashes to the sand, but something in her, the iron spine, the bird bones, keeps everything upright except the tears that start to spill onto the sand at her feet.

Bexley begins to realize she has never really been angry before.

Not like this. Not like forgetting how to stand. Not like a rage so pure she cannot even feel it, only knows it lingers in her bloodstream because it is the force that propels her forward, not her muscles, not her nerves, not even her consciousness has control of her steps anymore, it is a river-clear stream of anger and despair that sends her slinking across the desert like a cat with those wide, dark eyes and skin buzzing with glitter.

She does not know where he is. If he is even here, or waiting where her feet take her too. But the cats in the empty markets see it, and the little desert lizards, and the carrion birds:

Bexley Briar, repeating like a litany, _____ is dead, ______ is dead.

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 


He watches Bexley Briar come and does not move. He sees her, the gilded gold of her skin and the ugly scar that branches down her face and Raum knows. Bexley has heard of his sins.
 
Grief leadens her limbs. They drag through the sand and the sand marks her path for all to see. She moves like a ghost and idly Raum wonders if it might be a gift to send her to Acton. Then they might wander together… But Raum would never bless their unity. He would never bless their afterlives. No, he would leave that to the gods of death and purgatory.
 
The Crow does not smile at her plight; he does not delight in her grief. He simply watches and waits as Bexley drifts towards him, a golden ship upon a sea of sand. Raum is the land that stands, unmoving before her. This reunion will be a wreck, he knows. Raum and Bexley are day and night, fire and ice; they are the opposites that she and Acton should have been too.
 
If he were a prophet, Raum might see the debris they would leave upon the desert, the carnage of a grieving girl and the cold hatred of a man hell bent upon destruction. Yet, he does not delight in the carnage of them as he did not delight when bathed in the blood of his brother.
 
Oh he watches this girl roam, how she strays. Raum has not seen her for many moons. Not since the day Acton gave her the scar upon her face – what a mystery love was that it could grow from violence! The sands groan as if they know and roll away beneath his feet. Does it beg him leave? That it might not have to witness what will become of Raum the murderer and Bexley the lover?
 
Ah, Raum loathes, with perfect hatred, Bexley Briar and all she is. Best friend of his once lover, left hand advisor to Seraphina (that queen now gone, left ragged and broken upon the Steppes) and a girl of Day. Her sins, in his eyes, are bountiful. Upon his heart is a vow, upon his lips is poison and in it he holds all the terrible things he would say to her.
 
But this is Raum. And Raum says nothing at all but simply stands in the brilliant silver of his skin and waits for Bexley to see him.  He waits for the bruise of those violet eyes and the vengeance the violence he would find within them. Oh he wants it! Oh he craves it! Oh how he needs it! Their shared deeds are as countless as the grains of stand the Day girl moves upon. The wind pushes her closer and it rushes to him carrying her voice and the litany of words upon it. The wind is eager and it wants him to know that Bexley knows. The girl passed on the message and…
 
He is dead, yes.
 
Raum hurts just a little, he aches for his brother and recoils from the ghost of Acton’s blood that still haunts his mouth with its metal taste. Yet there is no space for grief or regret within Raum now. Deftly he quashes down all his feelings for his broken brother. But, his soul is dying, it twists and turns and rots away within the bones and sinew of Raum’s torso.
 
Yes, Bexley, Raum thinks but does not say, Acton is dead. Shall we celebrate together?

---

@Bexley

[Bexley]

I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.

He would be ashamed if He could see her. That is almost worse than anything else.

If Bexley could see herself she knows she would hate it. Possessing her body is bad enough - much less being witness to it - even now, blessedly ignorant of her own visual faults, she drifts in and out of awareness, alternating dimensions with each step, here and gone and back again, stepping without notice, humming without notice, speaking without notice as if she is trying to drown it out. And yet in every dimension the noise follows her: God is dead, God is dead.

(And He would be flattered, if He could hear it, but disappointed too - )

Black and gold again, and then silver, and Bexley’s heart staggers against the inside of her chest, and she tastes her pulse in her mouth and draws to a stop, and it is with an idle kind of observance she notices that she has never really looked at him the way she should have. Not closely enough, and not hatefully enough - everything is a mask, the mercury skin, the twin blue of his eyes, the just there-slat patterning of his ribs, the knife - everything a mask covering the heart of a monster. Though Bexley cannot say she is really any different.

The moon makes him bright. All gauze and hard starshine. It is his kind of light, obviously. Bexley wonders if it beautifies or depresses her, if Raum sees loving sorrow or patheticism. It is hard to tell which she is feeling, or if it is both, if she can hold both, or why she stops in the sand and stares at him in utter silence instead of moving, or screaming, or lunging, or setting the world around them on fire. There are so many wonderful ways to be violent.

Instead everything goes terribly, terribly still.

What did it feel like to kill him? How did you do it? I know you're blessed with that stupid knife, I know God let you have it. I'm sure you used it. Or did you strangle Him? Did you crush his bones just to feel more powerful? Are you still wearing his blood? Did you say anything or did you do it silently? Did you let Him suffer? Were you kind, in the way only an executioner can be? Did you at least afford him that? Did you afford him anything at all when you murdered him? Did he scream? Did He tell you He loved you? Did He tell you he loved me? Sometimes we do things to see how bad we can feel. Is that why you did it? Why did you do it? Did you say goodnight? Are you nuclear? Who watched? Does He look better dead? Did you like it? Do you feel good about it? Do you? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are -

Are you okay?

She glances down at his knife, visible only for the way it drops a shadow on his skin. And then meets his eyes, and is surprised she can do it, and is surprised that she can talk at all, much less to say what she did, but the world is oh-so-full of wild things, themselves included, and Bexley thinks maybe she should just give up her habit of predictions while she's still ahead of the betting curve.

The wind washes them of heat and sand and guilt. It swirls Bexley's bleached hair against her cheek, almost-but-not-quite covering the patent scar that curls her lips, and now she knows, for better or for worse, God is watching.

What else is there to say? The numbness in her chest could be any number of things - anger, guilt, shame, terror. The thought of Seraphina's broken body lurks in the back of her mind as a mirror image of Acton's. And the Day Court, looming behind him, threatens collapse even as she looks at it, as though its bones are already starting to crumble to dust. Even the sand seems dark and moldy. He is cruel to take so much from her so quickly, but of course he knows that.

Her mouth opens like a cave. She shivers a little against the dark and the breeze. And then she thinks of Him and her heart squeezes in her chest and she blinks away salt and sand and says, wavering, tearful, I know you loved Him.

And she could never blame him for it.

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

Mors. Even the very word meant death and here Raum and Bexley stand, in the deepest dark of night, lit by a moon as bright as Charon’s lamp. The death desert laughs in its shadowy corners, it rejoices in her grief.
 
Raum is silver beneath silver. That lamp of moonlight leaves nothing untouched. It paints all in mercury: bright and dim and deathly beautiful. Even Bexley it washes out. From her it steals all the gold of the sun, the light of her magic, and leaves her argentate. Silver and white, wth her blue eyes blown wide with grief, she is every part a lost soul in this barren Underworld.
 
Raum can hear the darkness of night as it swallows daylight and makes this desert it’s own. Ah, the Crow would gladly wander its sands at night but never in the day, if he thought for a moment that there would not be a rebellion. Yet oh he needs eyes by night and by day, to watch for the rebellion, for those traitorous to the crown.
 
His eyes turn back to the phantom girl. Behind those eyes of hers so many questions drift and he does not hear them, not when they lie so hidden. Yet oh how he feels there presence. They are pricks along his skin each one a hurt that wounds Bexley more than he. If she asked him each hurt – what might he say? Raum is no liar, and the truth he brands upon the hollow of his soul. His answers would be thus:

What did it feel like to kill him?
Like agony and life and a broken spirit, wild and furious.

How did you do it?
With teeth and claws and bitter loss.

I know you're blessed with that stupid knife, I know God let you have it. I'm sure you used it.
I did not. Acton tried to use it upon me.

Or did you strangle Him?  
I did not.

Did you crush his bones just to feel more powerful?
No, but I did it to be quick.

Are you still wearing his blood?
No, but I taste it still. It is a phantom in my mouth, all metal and warm and broken.

Did you say anything or did you do it silently?
Silently – what more was there to say?

Did you let Him suffer?
No, I loved him too much for that.

Were you kind, in the way only an executioner can be?
I did not let him suffer, how much kinder can an executioner be, Bexley Briar?

Did you at least afford him that? Did you afford him anything at all when you murdered him?
I afforded him a death at his brother’s hand. It is an honourable thing.

Did he scream?
He did not have time.

Did He tell you He loved you?
No.

Did He tell you he loved me?
No.

Sometimes we do things to see how bad we can feel. Is that why you did it?
No.

Why did you do it?
Because you made him soft, Bexley Briar. Because you were bad for him. Because he loved an unworthy queen enough to take her side. He attacked me in order to kill me, a Crow turning upon a Crow can only end in death and that was not my Time.

Did you say goodnight?
No.

Who watched?
Isra – would you like to ask her what she thought?
 
Does He look better dead?
No. But he is better off dead.

Did you like it?
Yes and no.

Do you feel good about it?
Yes.

Do you?
Yes.

Are you okay?
Yes.

Are you okay?
Yes.

Are you-
 
‘Are you okay?’ her words are bright sparks. She never asked him any of the other questions and his answers remain as secret as her questions. Never would he speak them and the air remains silent. Raum stands before Bexley, a monster among men. He opens his mouth to speak, yes, yes, “No.”
 
No, he is not okay. No, the world is spinning and he is no longer its master. No, for his grief is a tidal wave and he is drowning. No, because he does not hurt, it was right, Acton was weak – less than a brother at his end. No, because a part of him always thrilled in death. Yet oh how Raum grounds himself in her probing gaze. He anchors onto every unspoken question.

I know you loved him.’ Those words hang heavy and laden with truth. They are a splitting fruit, his sorrow the juice that runs and sticks to his skin. Oh Raum will have to scrub, scrub, scrub himself clean. Before him, the Solterran girl is no longer phantom soft, she becomes skin and bones and bright, bright skin, for beside her stands something other. Acton is gossamer death and spirit vacant. Raum can see through him, to the canyon that ranges beyond. Acton in death has swallowed the world: Raum’s world, Bexley’s world.
 
Yet Raum has sent so many to their deaths and he blinks, slow, slow. Acton’s ghost is no more when his eyes so slowly open. The only Ghost remaining is Raum, and he stands bright and resplendent in the night, here to haunt Bexley Briar every step of her existence.
 
He moves toward her, his lips reaching for her cheek, as if to lay a kiss of apology upon the soft of her skin. He breathes, tremulous, burdened, “I did. I do. I love him unto death for he is my brother.” Such confessions brush her skin and his eyes close, one beat, two, a third, before they open and there is Acton’s ghost again. “You were bad for him, Bexley. He became disloyal.” Raum whispers into the shell of her ear. “It all ended with you.”
 
And this time, he does not blink away his brother’s ghost.

---

@Bexley

[Bexley]

I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.

No.

Well, what did she expect?

For it to be satisfying. For it to feel good - some part of her, dormant and wishful, begged to think that hearing him admit his pain would make hers fade slightly. At the very least, make it feel proportional.

But no, hearing the smooth silver of his voice does not make her want to do anything but die, and to know that the man she loved was the brother of a demon does not make her feel anything but a doubting of her own good judgement.

No.

Acton is watching them. Bexley knows that better than anything. His eyes up in the stars, his hand in the silent wind. In the way her blood roars in her ears. In the clouds starting to cover the moon. She thinks of their daughter and her Delphic third eye and wonders if she is watching, too, and whether all of this means anything at all to her, strange little girl that she is. It must. She remembers, suddenly, the story O once told her of meeting her father in the desert: that he was kind, and that in the moonlight, painted against the sand, he looked like a ghost -

No.

She wonders vaguely if Raum is lying. He’s supposed to be good at that. He’s lied to her before - to her, to Acton, to Seraphina - told her she would die, easy and painless, when instead she emerged from the rocks scarred and bloody and foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, uncontainable by her body or the normal limits of human emotion. But he could not have known, then. That she was God’s daughter. That she was strong, heavy-boned underneath the gold. That she would refuse death, even when handed to her on a silver platter, even when it called her name.

Now he knows better.

He moves toward her, and now she understands why they call him the Ghost. He should stand out in Solterra like a sore thumb, but the moonlight kisses him, covers him with a whole-mouth embrace, and he is suddenly as insubstantial as a cloud, a reflection, a moving sheet of water. His bones seem to disappear and reappear in different places; his shadows are unreasonably thin; even with her gaze following him, there are spots in which his body seems completely invisible. The only thing she can see consistently are his eyes, murderous blue.

She realizes they are the same color as hers.

She clenches her jaw until it aches.

He reaches toward her, and again she wonders how he can lie so well, how he can press a kiss to her cheek like he did not pray for the whole of her skull to be crushed under those falling rocks. She does not move, does not flinch, but her dark eyes follow him with a watchdog intensity, every movement realized and catalogued. He smells like death. His breath on her skin is bitter and hot.

And when he speaks, it is in the growl of a wolf, not the words of a civilized person. And yet she understands it. And that is what really scares her.

Incredulity rises in her chest like a tidal wave. Disbelief, disgust - she leans back to look at him more fully and her lip curls, like the unfurling petal of a rose. He is a monster. Even worse, a fool. It ended with you, he says, and she can tell he believes it, and the concept is so insane, so utterly ridiculous, that she wants to laugh. She wants to smile. But something stops her.

She thinks of Acton. She pictures him in her head, clear as day. And every inch is familiar: the thin scar on his shoulder, the true black of his hair, the bright, cruel amber of his eyes, and the low sweet smoke of his voice, and the oh-so-alive warmth of him and the sound of coins and cards and breathing.

And, like a ghost, he appears next to her.

But not a ghost. Bexley’s sorrow fills her with power. It makes his form seem solid, as if you could touch him, leaning close enough -

But she has done this innumerable times, recently, and she knows better. Raum does not.

She stares at him. The blue of her eyes says murder.

It says choke on this, and Acton dies a hundred times in the next thirty second. Crushed by a floating hoof, then with his throat slit from ear to ear, then with his bones cracking silently, all at random, then choking on air, then thrashing like he has just drunk poison, corporeal all the time, he dies again and again, throttled, bruised, broken, right in front of both of them, over and over, though no sound escapes him, and Bexley is dripping tears but her gaze burns and never moves from Raum’s, never, ever flinches.

Her lip trembles with the effort, and just as instantly as he appeared, Acton vanishes again.

You will only be a Ghost, she says, almost snarling, as long as people care to remember you. And you have just killed the last person who loved you enough to do so -

She tosses a burning spiral of light into the ground at their feet, scattering waves of hot sand into a wall between them, and before it can even reach the dunes on its way back down she is moving toward him, head ducked, shoulders hunched.

Rhoswen does not love you, she says, and her skin glows, Sabine does not love you, her eyes turn to molten gold, Reichenbach left you, she sizzles with heat, the air around them burns gold, sparks go whizzing around her fine-boned head, Acton is dead.

Bexley stops abruptly. She sheds the magic as easily as a gossamer scarf. There is only a foot or two between them, if that, and she turns from god to girl in half a second - no more glowing, no more powers. In that moment.

So I’m sorry, she finishes, and it is painfully genuine, That you are really on your own now. You could have stopped it.

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 


Oh Bexley stares at him. Her eyes are wide as moons and deep as oceans churning. She is close, close enough to touch. Yet to touch each other is to touch death and mortality yawns, chasm wide between them. Raum’s words still whisper, nipping at the flesh of her ear, her mind.
 
Her golden lip curls and he watches the baring of her teeth.  They gleam bright as bone bleached beneath the sun. Raum did not sway his eyes from Acton’s ghost, not until he looked at Bexley’s sneer, at the fury curling her as though she were paper in a fire. The edges of her golden skin are burning, the Ghost thinks. She is ash and embers and Raum is there to drink in the very smoke of her.
 
When he looks back, his brother’s ghost is gone. Only the canyon stretches out before him, a lion beneath the sun.
 
But stood beside Bexley is something far worse. Yet the girl does not flinch. Does she not see him? Acton is there! He is flesh and bone, sparks and oceans deep. Acton is material enough to set the world ablaze. His mane is slick oil, rippling in a phantom breeze. Raum could embed his dagger within his brother again and pull it away bloody. Acton watches Raum with that whiskey gaze, idle as liquor slipping down the throat and ready as liquor poured out before an eager flame.
 
Raum has known magic. He knows the illusions of this world, he keeps his eyes open for them, his heart trained against surprise. Yet nothing can stop the twist of wicked shock. Nothing can extinguish the love of a brother, no matter the crime. There is a lance in Raum’s chest, a wildfire in his stomach. The lance is serrated, each barb laced with joy and anguish, horror and fear. Each serration cuts him into ragged flesh.
 
And then Acton dies.
 
A god’s hoof comes to shatter his skull and where is the echoing crunch? But then, blood fountains from a rictus cut that smiles red, red, red across Acton’s throat. Where is the splash of blood? Where is the gurgle? And when Acton has died a second time, he dies a third, a fourth, a fifth, Bexley’s magic knows no end and it plays for him every gruesome murder until Raum should be painted like a god of war in Acton’s blood and rent flesh.
 
How many of those deaths had Raum not used? He can too easily count the few. He knows the soundtrack to each and every one he has used. He knows how the earth sounds as it drinks blood deep – ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He knows the sounds of bones breaking, he knows how they feel beneath his jaws. He knows how Acton’s bones felt between his teeth, he knows the feel of Acton’s body twitching, reaching, begging for life as his brother pushes, pushes it out, away, gone. And then Acton disappears.
 
Oh there is nothingness in the wake of the departed, there is no blood but a ray of light that Bexley coils like a whip. It burns the sand at Raum’s feet. Glass gleams where it strikes. Each shard is hot and bright and lies glorious beneath the sun.
 
There is nothing where Acton stood, but there is everything within Raum. Oh something is shifting, something is flying through his veins. It burns his vessels like ozone before a comet. It is clawing to get out. It is something caged and rabid and it is not a lion’s rumbling roar, it is not the tearing screech of a dragon, it is something worse. It is worlds ripping apart, it is a soul rending – not in this world, not in the next. It is the shattering of existence, the white-hot glow of the sun swallowing its galaxy.
 
Bexley comes to meet it. She hunches forward, her head held low, the dark of her scar a rip in this world of theirs.
 
You will only be a ghost She says, and that thing inside Raum is clawing. Bexley is speaking and that thing is listening.
 
Rhoswen does not love you And she makes his skin shine as she moves like the sun descending, coming to swallow her world.
 
Sabine does not love you, And the sun evaporates the sea of her eyes. That thing within Raum is thrashing.
 
 Reichenbach left you, The air ignites and that thing inside Raum is wild. It screams like darkness, the black rising up to swallow the sun. For is that not how it always has been? The girl is wildfire and the air ripples with heat from her fury.
 
Acton is dead. Sparks land upon his flesh, it scolds him, it melts him, but darkness is rising and it brings with it something monstrous.
 
Raum’s lips part as a cry escapes like a roar. It rips through the air, it splits the sky like lightning and Raum’s skin is not enough to hold him. He shifts to black, to gold, to brown, to red. He stays red as blood, as if each inch of his flesh is sheared from his torso, as if the very air is acid. Raum is splitting and he shakes as Bexley falls still. Grey eyes watch her. They become savage, black as endless black. They are black holes, formed to swallow her sun.
 
Bexley’s magic is gone and the girl trembles with her effort. She is once again only gold, only a slip of a girl stood before a swallowing black monster adorned in crimson flesh.
 
Then: So I’m sorry… That you are really on your own now. You could have stopped it.
 
And slowly, slowly his gaze lifts to hers - it is the beast within him rising up. His eyes find her and he stares, still as stone, black eyes stealing the very air between them. He is the black of his monster rising from the deep, the shudder of water readying.
 
It comes, ascending…
 
It breaches, and Raum lunges for Bexley with claws and fangs, scales and crimson eyes.
 
This monster of his is grief and it is made to hurt, to ruin.

---

@Bexley

[Bexley]

I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.

He sees it. Acton. The not-ghost. And Bexley can tell because the horror that shines in his gaze like a fire, like a burning story, is the same horror that has been eating her from the inside out for days upon days upon days. Now they can share it.

Bexley watches him as he watches Acton. She sees the way he trembles, like a little fawn - the way he cannot quite tear his eyes away, desperate to see his brother again as more than a mirage - it should hurt her, but it does not, not at all. It pleases her. And she cannot imagine that Acton would argue for her to feel anything otherwise. Raum stands but a breath from her,  too-still, frozen with pain, still watching, still watching:

And it makes her smile. Is it a smile? Curling her lips like that feels foreign. It fits wrong. Oh, it is a smile, but only in the same way a crocodile smiles, reptilian and overly sharp, full of a fetish for blood; to anyone else it would look hysterical; to her, it feels like flying.

Her whole body roils with anger. Bexley feels like she might transcend a physical form, like the burn inside her is so hot she’ll turn totally to ash. It feels good. It feels like being alive. Now more than ever she understands how precious that feeling is, even when it gnaws on her bones, even when it hurts to feel it.

The moon screams its light from overhead. There is a brief respite between the last of Bexley’s words and the first of Raum’s reactions; in that tiny moment, there is nothing but them and their shared pain, and the way Bexley fights to breathe through her anger, the inhales rasping and grating; the deep, dark silence, breached only by the soft wind and the shifting of sand and the gnashing of Bexley’s teeth meeting each other over and over again.

Then his eyes turn black.

It is fascination that keeps her gaze trained on him, more than real fear. Her magic is illusory. Strong, terrifying, but illusory still: the glamour on her skin and the blaze of gold that accompanies it are nothing more than a trick of the light, and even her fireballs are a prism effect, nevermind how much they hurt. Raum is different. Raum is totally and utterly inhuman. Raum sheds his skin like a snake - sheds his whole body, as it’s nothing more than a vehicle to carry his monstrous soul.

The black deepens. She wonders if she has pushed her luck too far. She realizes she does not care.

It is with aching slowness and care that he meets her gaze. The void between them widens, deepens, cracks yet further. Around her throat, the gold chain starts to sizzle. Oh, years must pass between the last of her words and the final moment where Raum’s eyes lock with her eyes - time passes too slowly to become anything but eons.

Bexley knows he will kill her. She knows that he both has and is a weapon. She knows that she is nothing more than a faerie girl of gold, even in the kindest light.

She also knows that she has never been afraid of a fight.

Even as she sees his rage build and build and build, multiplying its own darkness exponentially, fear does not ensnare her. Even as she prepares for the end, she starts to collect her magic, a pool of energy, in her chest.

And when he reaches for her she is ready.

Even braced as she is, it startling to see him in action. Time seems to slow to a syrupy crawl: in the endless moments that pass, Bexley is unwilling awed by the fluid way his skin fades into dark, shining scales, how his black eyes turn so easily to burning red, his teeth shave themselves into carnivorous point. It is beautiful and horrifying. Now she sees that he is nothing at all but a vehicle for death, and it is something of a comfort.

The scream pierces her ears. His fangs glisten in the silver light. The distance between them closes. And everything that follows happens in a split second, in a parallel-seeming dimension, though it hurts like it’s more than real:

His lips wrap around her throat; the beginnings of bright pain spark up and down her neck and explode like fireworks against the back of her forehead; but there is no time to die, not here, not now, and before he can tear her apart, Bexley smashes a huge ball of screaming-hot white light into the sand between them. It burns a ring of soot the size of a tree trunk into the dunes and shatters into an explosion of glass-sharp shards that lovingly, reverently avoid her, aiming, instead, for Raum’s dark scales and bright eyes.

She laughs a laugh so hollow it turns into a snarl. So hollow it makes her cough. Sparks drip from the inside corners of her eyes, from the tiny spaces between her bared teeth: the whole world is gold now, the whole world is hers. The light from the still-spinning shards reflects across her coat like a glamour spell, so that it is impossible to tell where the desert ends and she begins.

It is only the slow pour of blood from just under her jaw, dutifully staining the sand, that provides any context as to the whereabouts of her body.

You fucking idiot. She knows he has damaged her when she hears her own voice: it breaks and grates and sounds utterly demonic - the gnash of his teeth has crushed her vocal cords, more than slightly, and she knows it is only a matter of time before they close up completely in their vainglorious attempt to heal.

So what needs to be said before the opportunity is gone?

Bexley levels her head with his. Light pours from her nostrils and her mouth. Her lips part.

I am telling you now, she croaks, blood and gold mingling to drip like tar from her teeth, I am never going to die.

[Raum]

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

 

Bexley Briar is light and she is bleeding upon the sand. He looks to her, with her blood upon his lips. He knows the taste of the crimson liquid that drips from her jaw and tumbles to the desert below. The sand swallows it, staining dark with the sin of Raum’s deeds. Through those dark droplets (like eyes) it watches him. It names him a sinner, a murderer. Yet Raum already knows just what he is. Like he knows that Bexley should have died that day within the cave.
 
The light dances along her skin. It glitters like tears, it glitters as if shocked by all they have said, all that they have done. She curses him, but already he is unfeeling. Already her blood has turned him numb. He is as cold as metal, as cold as death.
 
Her curse is a croak, coarse enough to rub like sandpaper. It grates between them and he simply stares at her. He simply regards her as though she is not there. Her words are little more than a whip across his face and already his skin is healing. Oh he is stone, he is numb, his veins are as if full of liquor and gunpowder.
 
He lifts his chin up, his eyes closing, her blood slips down his throat and there is no revelry in him. There is no monster proud of his attack. He wears her curse like a cross to bear, he feels its nails piercing his skin again and again and again. But as a Messiah was supposed to die, so too is he ready for judgment. Whenever it may come. Until then…
 
“Get out, Bexley.” He says soft as silk. “Get out of Solterra. You are exiled.” He walks towards her, his blue eyes blazing brighter than the core of any flame. “I wont kill you today.” He spits her blood upon the sand. “But I will, if I ever see you again.”
 
And he turns. And he is walking away, feeling Acton’s gaze upon him. The Magicican’s ghost knows what the Ghost knows also. Raum does not want to kill Bexley Briar. Not when she is the only one around who grieves as much as him… who understands. But, by the gods, if he sees her again, he will end her.

---

@Bexley - thank you for one of the most intense threads! <3 your words are absolute magic. i didn't realise how short this was until I posted it. It felt like the fitting end, I hope it is okay o.o; 

[Bexley]

I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.

The worst part of it all is how, still, he does not take her seriously.

He does not shiver, he does not shake, nor look away: even pouring blood and gilt, foaming with rage, Bexley is not enough to impress him. It hurts her like nothing else he’s done. Why is she still no more than girl to the world after so much pain and suffering? Is that not how you become a woman? To know that after all this time, after all this insurmountable effort, all of Bexley’s power still does not make her tremble - almost she wants to scream at him, but bitterly she holds it back for fear of her throat fully rupturing.

Get out, he says, and Bexley heaves.

The pain is her stomach is horrible and nauseous and visceral. It sinks its claws into her until she thinks she might faint, until she can feel her weight shifting without aim or balance over her feet, and every muscle contracts and detracts with feverish delirium, but somehow she bites her tongue. (Whatever God is watching is doing so with rapt attention.)

She steels herself with a hard, horrible breath. Get out, Raum says, and Bexley knows, as much as she knows her own name, that someday soon Solterra will return Raum to her dead, and return her to the desert alive.

And that is called fate.

Bexley smiles at him as he turns, teeth slicked with dark blood. It pours into the back of her throat, a slough of salt and black and red, and patters against the sand and the curve of her hooves below her hung head.

Try, she snarls at him, and with a brief bare of her teeth turns back toward the edge of the desert to skulk away.

Not for long.