[P] too early for surrender too late for a prayer

[Vespir]

GIRL WITH AN ACCENT OF BLOOD

“Queen Marisol, I would like to apologize for interrupting your meeting earlier.” The words burn on her tongue -- humility had never come easily to her -- but her face is a mask lacking any hint of expression, angled so that she might be able to better see the winged mare from her good eye. “Commander Vespir, at your service.” She cannot bear to say ‘former’ just yet, not when she has lost so much already in the span of hours -- except that it hasn’t been just hours, has it? It has been sixty years of time robbed from her, sixty years of everyone she has ever known continuing to live and eventually dying while she had laid asleep in the swamp, sixty years of the Ager rotting away and forgotten.

Sixty years while the Ilati had faded away into obscurity, sixty years since her mother had been informed her daughter had disappeared and had died not knowing what had become of her, hidden away in the swamp they had called home where even the Ilati dared not tread.

Sixty years of grief in the span of a few hours, weighing upon her slender shoulders until she felt like she could drown beneath it.

Cleopatra had been gentle, at least as gentle as Cleo ever could be, but… there was no softening the blow, no way to escape the truth or hide it beneath pleasantries. She had slept while everyone around her had struggled and died, had failed in her mission to find Prudence and restore the Ager.

Just the knowledge of her failure burned.

Vespera, what will become of me now?

@Marisol

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[Marisol]

I am not led; I lead.

Queen Marisol.

 It sounds strange. It pulls at her like an Atlas-weight. The sound of the court’s murmurs and the knowledge of their sorrow pounds at her heart like a hammer. And though she’s already feeling pretty prickly following the events of that god-forsaken meeting, when she steps down from the center of the meeting and the buckskin moves towards her and introduces herself as Commander Vespir—

Well. Queen Marisol is trying to be sympathetic, but with every word of this stranger’s she’s finding it harder and harder. 

Marisol comes to a clean stop, hooves loud on the cobblestone. Commander Vespir. She wants to chew this woman out for daring to disrespect her, she wants to scream and throw a tantrum and take her out dragged by the hair, anything to get out of here, anything to make this simpler—but that is a barbarian’s solution, and Mari is not a barbarian, at least not anymore—so Queen Marisol grits her teeth and hardens her expression and meets Vespir’s eyes with a gaze that does not sing of anything but steel.

“Thank you,” says Marisol, and her voice is not so rough, a surprise even to her. “Vespir.” (And she says it like this because she knows it is the only way to keep order—not Commander, not even ex-Commander, just Vespir. Her tone does not betray all those years of reading about her and Cleopatra in the Halcyon’s records, or the stories she’d been told. It does not give the impression of belonging to someone who might have looked up to this Commander, once.

Mari tries to force her mouth out of its frown. It half-works. “I imagine,” she continues carefully, “That you have many questions. As do I.”

There is a faint curiosity attached to the end of it, which Mari can’t quite form her throat around. 

"Speaking."

credits

[Vespir]

GIRL WITH AN ACCENT OF BLOOD

It burns in a way that physical wounds cannot when she hears her name without Commander before it. She had thought, once, that she would die with the title, on a battlefield where she belonged -- that she would not see the day it would transfer to another being, because a good commander did not retire to see such a day, they died the same as they had lived; sacrificing their body for their unit, their nation, their goddess.

It was something else that had been stolen from her, added to the list of indignities she had suffered -- but it is not the bay mare with the spotted wings who had stolen her title from her, who had stolen her hero’s death, and so she inclines her head just the slightest bit, just enough to acknowledge the absence of her title.

And it is not entirely closure -- it is still far too new for that, still far too aching of a wound -- but it is something close to it, he beginning of the idea that there is a life without her rank attached to it.

“Indeed,” She acknowledges softly at the Commander’s next words. “My first is, perhaps, of a strange priority to me, but -- would you happen to know what Ilati records still exist of grave sites established after my disappearance? My mother -- I must attend to her grave. I’m sure it has been neglected, by now.” Her mother, who would have died without ever knowing what became of her daughter, her mother, who had made her into what she was and had been deemed a savage by the courts -- her mother, whose death would not have been recorded by any historian of the court proper, and so she would have to rely on what little Ilati records still existed.

Oh Vespera, these strange people of the court, who destroy what they do not know -- let this have survived, at least.

@Marisol

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