all i want

KiadA but god, i look at you and know, hell is just another place i'll go As he spoke, she cherished the malformed words that slipped from his lips. She hung onto them like children being told a folktale, listening and believing everything he said. He had thought this was some sort of hell, a purgatory, for following his sister when he could have lived with her. But would it have worked? She thought of everything she had done in the Rift – having no one to worry about over and over again. Would she have thrown herself into the river to save Kisamoa if she had Ru’in by her side? Would she have died when he didn’t resurface? At first, there was a hole in her heart when he didn’t wrap his bulky arms around her. It began to crumble, slowly at first. After all this time, everything she’d survived this far and he didn’t think that he wouldn’t hurt her. Her eyes shut tight and she listened to his heartbeat, trying to press herself into him in the hope that he’d realize he couldn’t hurt her. As if he read her thoughts, his arms tightened around her body and she melted into him – finally, finally at home. “They took your fire.” She heard him say, and she nodded against his chest. “Took a lot of things.” She said quietly, sighing somewhat contently at the trace of his fingers along her spine where fire once plumed. But then, she sat up and looked at him fully. Her eyes scanning his freckled face and bi-colored eyes as he spoke of what he truly thought he had been put in. Sorrow crossed her features and she reached with a hand to gently stroke along his strong jawbone. She understood – in a place like this it was hard to say what it really was. She offered him a nod, absolutely zero judgement coming from the Harpy in the torment she was certain he suffered. He spoke of what he remembered and of what happened to Kisamoa, and she looked up to the snow that surrounded him with a pondering look before looking back down to him to recount everything that had happened. “To start from the beginning, we were all corralled by Kisamoa to enter the portal. When… When I saw what happened to you I was unable to be consoled. I was ready to follow you, but my mother shoved me into the portal at the last second. That amulet he had given me exploded upon entry and gave me this” she said, pulling her hair and furs aside to show the gnarled scar on the side of her neck. “My magic changed too, the fire on my spine was real and I could turn it off and on whenever I wanted. I could’ve made your inventions work.” She said, stroking her thumb along his cheekbone, referring to the time he had crafted that bronze device and they had tried to see if the energy created by her fire could energize the creation only to find it didn’t work. “When he met us the first time upon all of our arrivals, I got in his face and yelled at him.” She huffed, a small laugh at the audacity she had to stand up to a god. “He gave me gifts like armor and other things.” She shrugged lightly, before she began to get more serious. “But then he decided to try and resurrect the dead, and he fell into a river of his creation. Me, thinking he wouldn’t return and the world would die, went in after him. It was terrible. I watched myself die, suffocated by my very own flames.” She shuddered lightly at the memory, aimlessly moving her hand to clutch at her neck. “I got him back, and things were okay for a while. We were set on a series of tasks to try and spread light to the rest of the land and it worked for the most part. But another god came, and I think they threw us out of the Rift. I… landed somewhere strange and I lost Khairi along the way and all of my magic… Then I fell again and ended up here.” She said perhaps a bit quieter before she realized it. Looking back to him and his face, she leaned back down to hug him tight. “If this is hell, I’m pretty lucky.” She said, much softer than she’d ever said anything before as she turned her head up to look at him and crack a small smile. to keep you warm. and with bloody knuckles, you'd follow me anywhere.

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