Drinking from a bitter cup, burying the bottles with the bones
It’d been too hot, too fast. Outside their usual fire season, the prep time shortened, the need all the greater. Grasses have grown long and thick from all the rainfall the season prior, more extreme than years past, and this dry heat has drained them with an alarming speed and hunger. Lush meadows became a tinderbox, and Tanau’s attention the necessary spark.
If others hadn’t also blazed, spreading resources too thin, homes prioritized over pastures, maybe there could have been a way to salvage this. If it happened earlier in the season, when less channels had been spent, or if she’d been here, instead of returning from a trip to the Celestine, maybe something could have been done. If she’d prioritized water mages on her crew, or asked Frey for something other than arrows and buckles, perhaps she’d be in bed instead of ruin.
Her name bounces on the fringes of awareness, strangely muffled and distant. Enough so, that she’s surprised when she turns her head and Sunjata is so close. He must’ve called to her across her property, as likely to be a wraith as real for the sound of his voice. What he says next lands sharper, cleaner, like each word is burrowing past whatever muted curtain she’s tried to draw over herself. They’re a cruel reminder that the world is not on pause just because she wishes it so.
The clarity of what’s happened rushes back in all at once as the shelter she’d wrapped herself in peels away. Her hair shifts back onto her shoulders as she rises, turning towards him with a deliberate slowness. Her boot shifts in the rubble, bits of ash leaping into the stray winds, as liable to be parts of her drifting away as woodgrain and tanned hide. ”You want to help?” The words drag out of her throat like something caught there too long, frayed thin and pulled tighter still, threatening to snap.
Too late.
"If you'd done what you said you would and helped me with my fences, I wouldn't have been wasting time chasing wild unicorns and patching holes while this place turned to kindling." It's not fair, of course, to blame him for this. For any of it. It's the quick snarl of her anger, her grief, trying to find somewhere to land, he just happens to be in range. "When was the last time you did something for this land, Archon?" The title is drawn out as if the weight of it is pressing in on her throat. "All these years fighting fires here, and you haven't done more to protect it? Think your magic enough?" One hand gestures harshly to her side—not at him, but at everything. The blackened posts jutting from the earth like snapped bones, the hollow shell of what had been a barn, the smoke still lifting in slow, stubborn threads to blot out part of the stars as if it's pretending to be her ally now. All of it, evidence that he's not enough.
Teeth press in on one another, a grimace that better reads as anguish. Tears spill hot and furious, carving pale tracks against soot that's settled on her cheeks. She doesn't wipe them away, just bears through them, hating the tremble they bring to her breath. "When was the last time you did something for someone else, Sunjata?" She lifts her chin, frown so deep it pulls the quiver in her lip taut and keeps it from showing. Her throat works once, like she almost swallows the words, almost. "You just stay in your House and pretend the world only exists between sheets."
If others hadn’t also blazed, spreading resources too thin, homes prioritized over pastures, maybe there could have been a way to salvage this. If it happened earlier in the season, when less channels had been spent, or if she’d been here, instead of returning from a trip to the Celestine, maybe something could have been done. If she’d prioritized water mages on her crew, or asked Frey for something other than arrows and buckles, perhaps she’d be in bed instead of ruin.
Her name bounces on the fringes of awareness, strangely muffled and distant. Enough so, that she’s surprised when she turns her head and Sunjata is so close. He must’ve called to her across her property, as likely to be a wraith as real for the sound of his voice. What he says next lands sharper, cleaner, like each word is burrowing past whatever muted curtain she’s tried to draw over herself. They’re a cruel reminder that the world is not on pause just because she wishes it so.
The clarity of what’s happened rushes back in all at once as the shelter she’d wrapped herself in peels away. Her hair shifts back onto her shoulders as she rises, turning towards him with a deliberate slowness. Her boot shifts in the rubble, bits of ash leaping into the stray winds, as liable to be parts of her drifting away as woodgrain and tanned hide. ”You want to help?” The words drag out of her throat like something caught there too long, frayed thin and pulled tighter still, threatening to snap.
Too late.
"If you'd done what you said you would and helped me with my fences, I wouldn't have been wasting time chasing wild unicorns and patching holes while this place turned to kindling." It's not fair, of course, to blame him for this. For any of it. It's the quick snarl of her anger, her grief, trying to find somewhere to land, he just happens to be in range. "When was the last time you did something for this land, Archon?" The title is drawn out as if the weight of it is pressing in on her throat. "All these years fighting fires here, and you haven't done more to protect it? Think your magic enough?" One hand gestures harshly to her side—not at him, but at everything. The blackened posts jutting from the earth like snapped bones, the hollow shell of what had been a barn, the smoke still lifting in slow, stubborn threads to blot out part of the stars as if it's pretending to be her ally now. All of it, evidence that he's not enough.
Teeth press in on one another, a grimace that better reads as anguish. Tears spill hot and furious, carving pale tracks against soot that's settled on her cheeks. She doesn't wipe them away, just bears through them, hating the tremble they bring to her breath. "When was the last time you did something for someone else, Sunjata?" She lifts her chin, frown so deep it pulls the quiver in her lip taut and keeps it from showing. Her throat works once, like she almost swallows the words, almost. "You just stay in your House and pretend the world only exists between sheets."
Colt
I kept the pain, now I only feel alive inside the flame
Received a Gilded Market wig from Remi that resembles her usual hair and is enchanted to stay on better than most wigs | has a reverse centaur tattoo on her left hand with the legs going down her pointer and middle fingers that looks like this.
