[P] oath

[Sabine]

s a b i n e you are a garden  that will one day bloom The city drips like melting wax; too hot, too soft and it is formless against Raum's touch.  Sabine bears the earliest memories of her mother's Solterran pride like medallions salvaged from bloodshed, but the shimmering dominion of Rhoswen's idyll does not match up to the reality of the pale pinched province that wails now where glory once roared.  Her mother was many things, but a liar was not one of them.   Solterra was choking, and her father was only tightening his grip.  She thinks, quite unexpectedly then, of Abel. The wire-straight line of his mouth, how he didn't flinch when the flies bit at his neck, the way he looked at her as though her name was Eve and his Adam and they were walking wholly alone upon a newborn Earth. She wonders if he is still here, in this place where lions looked like mice. If you had been starved and tormented by a man without blood, wouldn't you? Sabi hopes Abel is long gone. Anywhere but here. She hopes, she hopes, she hopes.  But Raum is speaking, so softly she thought at first it was the glass singing still, and all thought of that blank-eyed boy runs clear of her mind.  Sabine listens to his denial and how she longs to strike him, to reprimand him as though he were a fractious wayward child. Only a madman would look back upon the slaughter of so many good people without a care in the world.  She doesn't. Of course she doesn't. She is not like him. But she had always wanted to be: brave like him, sharp like him, knotted and brilliant like him. Now, as he stands before her, collecting his demons in a small metal cage, Sabine wonders if instead he should have been the one wanting to be more like her.  Raum's words spark and splutter like dying fireflies, reaching for that fading light one last time. She watches as they spiral earthward, tangling in the rapunzel sea-surf of her honeyed curls; defiling the last dregs of faith she had kept safe. He is not sorry for the crimes he had committed and it is a stake that he drives deeper into her mother's rotting memory.  The girl can feel the soft burn his defiance leaves upon her skin. She longs to curl her knees up close to her chest, to bury her head into her arms and weep for the senselessness of it all -- for all the souls who had not survived his hatred. The people who would not live to feel the fever of the brittle-winter-wind, to know the chorus of wonder that rises like magic at the sight of their child's first smile. They would never see the animate painting of the glass-winged butterfly flying south at dawn. They would never love - loathe - cry - laugh - live. Her father had taken everything from them.  And he did not care.  "I know why she left over and over again, Papa. It always felt like she was hoping, in each absence, that something would change. But it never did; it only got worse." She's staring at him now, searching for something that she wouldn't find, "I used to think it was my fault... That I had done something wrong," her heart thuds like a grenade, but now I know, it was you." The girl closes her eyes, listening to the distant sound of wind braying against the Mors, "She didn't win... She's dead, Papa. Where's the victory in that?" When she opens those too-bright shards of blue, he looks different: older, wearier, as though he were an ancient soul trapped in the body of a mortal.  "And you're going to die soon too." As the sunlight twists through the broken window, it sounds almost like a vow.

art created by rhiaan

@Raum