REXANNA
the chains are broken
Rexanna visibly winces as Kiada recites a history she’s tried so very hard to keep a secret. She might have been a different woman in Helovia, but the events that led up to the differences are the same. She’d slept with so many to get away from their grasp, and she had been successful. But upon her entry here versus her entry to Helovia, the shift had occurred. She hadn’t slept with hardly anyone, but she recalls the gathering at Bastien’s church and reaches up to pinch the bridge of her nose and exhale as it all floods back. When Kiada continues to shoot the poisoned words to her, Rexanna suddenly feels a burst of fire in her belly, and her hands slacken at her sides as she stares at the woman who in another world would’ve been her child, her baby, her first girl.“No.” She says simply, though there’s that fire in her voice, underlining it. “I didn’t sleep with the servants, and you know why Cal wants my head. He’s still alive in this version, so maybe you’ll be lucky and can see it happen if he finds his way here.” She snaps, so unlike herself in that moment that she has to remember who she is what she’s there for. She didn’t expect meeting Kiada to go like this, and she’s helpless in preventing the onslaught of sharp bladed words. She’d taught her daughter well in the ways of arguments, even if she failed in everything else.
And she’s not that same person, because she thinks of Bastien and his unwillingness to sign for the army – his artist nature and flourish for the dramatics. It’s unlike anything she’d known, and she finds the more Kiada recites of her other worldly version of herself, she finds that perhaps she’s far more in love with Bastien than she ever thought she was with Tembovu. Of course, it’s an imagination, a memory of something she never lived, but she can see the pain stretched along Kiada’s face, and she wants to take it all back and be better, even if there’s no way to.
Rexanna has let a lot of people down.
She inhales sharply, and shakes her head again. “It was a mistake, your father and I. But I got you out of it, and you’re here.” She says, gesturing to the Harpy. “You’re a survivor, like me. We’ve made it despite everything, can’t you see that?”
but are you truly free?
