I didn't mean to (TW)

Maea

And time it waits for no one
It heals them when you die

The accusations were worse than daggers. Worse than fire or a hundred cuts, because they struck at the deepest doubts within her and tore them all open. Every excuse and every soothing band-aid of love and reassurance her brother had applied over the course of the half season or so ripped clean off and exposed a festering mess crawling with unclean things. The faces of dead Fae screaming down at her carried the semblances of her own lost family. Father. Mother. Brother. Nieces and nephews, all gone before their time. All dead due to hardship and back-breaking labor to survive in a dying land, until sickness and plague or monsters in the night came to claim them.

And she... she had replaced them. Not joined them, or died with them. She had turned her back and filled the void of them with others. With strangers, who would never know. Never truly know.

Above her hovered someone who did. Someone she might have been overjoyed to join forces with, before everything came undone. And now... now she was judged, and condemned, and all Maea could do was curl up and cover her head with her hands. "I'm sorry," she gasped, to the faces of ghosts that might never stop haunting her memories. "I didn't meant to, I didn't - I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry, I'm - "

Tears that were not tears oozed from eyes that wouldn't blink. Unseeing they stared into the void, as all that she had begun to rebuild came undone under wrathful gaze of this reaper in holy rags.

All thoughts of escaping or defending herself were gone. All that remained was the guilt.

And soon you are forgotten
A whisper within a sigh

I can give you freedom from your guilt with a flick of my wrist

There’s a moment where she pauses. She doesn’t hesitate - she is too far gone in grief and prejudice for that. But she lingers, taking in the Ascended’s weeping figure. Contempt and disgust take place of pity, but beneath that there is merely…hollowness. This crusade is all she has left in her life.

No family. No kin. No title. A home that is well-defended, now, but which has no need for her.

Nephele has no illusions of surviving this war.

Why delay the inevitable?

She eyes the Ascended in a new light. If she fails in this, her torment will be over. If she succeeds, it will continue on, but she will have felled one more Ascended before the end. What is there to lose?

There is no use hiding her expression. Whichever outcome, Nephele doesn’t care to hide that she is desperate. That she wants this to be over. “Apologies don’t bring her back,” and her voice is like a yawning void, bottomless and starving for something it can’t have. When she dives, arm pulled back for the final blow, she does so with a wide opening to her torso. A delay to her strike. But a delay that will not last forever. One of them has to connect - Nephele doesn’t care anymore who that will end up being.

I can give you death with the look upon my face

Maea

And time it waits for no one
It heals them when you die

Apologies brought no one back. Nor would the apologies of the dead ever reach the ears of the living.

No one knew that better than herself.

And in a flash, as flame-edged daggers came hurtling down towards Maea, the face that flashed before her belonged not to a dead brother but a living one. It was enough. All she needed to react.

Her left arm came up to shield herself from the blow the Fae aimed at her, and in the right one, her hand clutched the dagger hard. Circuits connected within her palm and as she blindly thrust upwards, electricity licked the metal blade. There was a dull thump as it connected with the flesh of the woman, stabbing deep into her chest. And Maea screamed as fire ate into her lower arm, cutting and burning until it grated against something that might have been bone.

She had forgotten what pain tasted like. The kind of horror it evoked. There was no room left for thoughts or feelings as she kicked and heaved to get the crazy fae woman off of her, and the electricity kept pulsing. On and on - was it a second? A minute? - before she tore herself free and scrambled off to the side, scraping the gaping wound in her arm against the damp grass, against crushed and broken flowers in a mad attempt at putting out the fire that ate through her veins.

And soon you are forgotten
A whisper within a sigh

I can give you freedom from your guilt with a flick of my wrist

Both connect, and nobody is more surprised than Nephele. Their screams chorus in a macabre harmony, the electricity forcing noise where the dagger would have silenced it. Her limbs jerk as her muscles contract fiercely, the sound of agony strained as it forces itself through her clenched teeth, jaw forced shut. As she’s thrown sideways and the electricity finally ceases, Nephele stares up into the sky, breathless, and marvels at how the pain of the dagger itself is nearly absent. It feels more like she’s been punched solidly in the chest, especially with how the weapon remains embedded and stifling the blood flow.

But it won’t for long.

The woman’s screaming is muffled in her ringing ears. She can’t feel her fingertips to know if her chakrams are still clutched in them. There is only the sky above. The same sky she has flown in since her wings were capable of carrying her. A second home to any Fae. The only companion she has anymore, and the one that comforts her here and now as she feels her heart thudding in her chest. A dying rabbit kicking about frantically, doing nothing but hastening the end as it expends futile energy.

As Maea screams, and blood starts to seep through her shirt in a blooming rose over her chest, Nephele swallows down the iron on her tongue and smiles serenely at the sky.

I can give you death with the look upon my face

Maea

And time it waits for no one
It heals them when you die

The grass was more than damp. Her skin sizzled and bubbled nastily around the deep cut but the hiss died down soon enough, and almost too quickly the sensation of alarm began to fade. With no heart to race and no lungs to gasp for air it was only her mind that raced, battered and bruised from the woman's abuse and what her own hands had done.

Looking down at them, Maea stared numbly at the blood that coated the pale skin. Her gaze went to the woman in the grass. The crushed flowers. The hilt of a very familiar dagger that protruded from a chest that barely moved.

"No... No no no!" Scrabbling to her feet, the girl stumbled over and fell to her knees next to the fae, whose name she didn't even know. Maea was no healer. She didn't know injuries like these. But the look in those eyes, that vacant expression - it wasn't good.

Impulsively she grabbed for a bronze-skinned arm. Shook it until that nasty odd dagger fell out, and without thinking Maea buried her fangs into the limb. The ecstasy that came rushing was nauseating in that moment, and secondary; without knowing what she was doing she fumbled for something, anything that might help. She released Nephele's arm, and a pale glow appeared around her own hands that tried to staunch the flow of blood.

The dagger. It was in the way. Maea reached for it, pulled it out - and she pressed her still glowing hands to the deep wound, even as blood began to bubble up around her fingers. Overflowing, dying them crimson.

"Please, don't die. Don't go, I'm so sorry! You're going to be okay, please, just please be okay - " Sobbing, she leaned over the red-haired Fae and tried to catch her gaze.

And soon you are forgotten
A whisper within a sigh

I can give you freedom from your guilt with a flick of my wrist

Everything feels a little like cotton. She is safe here, in Ludo’s rags, with Mort calling her name somewhere in the distance. She is still present, still aware, but she is calm and unafraid. All things wither and die. Some with the seasons, some with cataclysmic storms and unprecedented changes. What is she but another sprout? Returning home to the soil.

As her arm is grasped Nephele manages to rock her head slightly to the side, but when she tries to open her mouth only frothy blood bubbles forth. Did the blade nick a lung? Her heart? With how swiftly she can feel herself fading, Nephele is sure it must be one - or both. The fangs that bite into her are barely a pinch in comparison to the pain in her chest, but the disgust is far away, and the pleasure somehow soothing instead of invigorating. Like syrup in her veins.

But then the dagger is being ripped free, and Nephele spasms weakly in the wet grass, blood trailing over the corner of her mouth to streak down her cheek and into her red hair. As Maea’s hand comes up Nephele feels magic at work, and with the last of her strength she grabs for the woman’s wrist to try and stop her. “No,” she croaks, lungs rattling. Her throat works hard, but all it accomplishes is spilling more blood over her lips. “Please. No.” And she meets Maea’s searching eyes, the distant quality of her own fading just enough to be cognizant, coherent. Aware of what exactly it is she asks for, and from the person she’d forced to do it. That, too, is clear on the Fae’s face. That she’d planned this, even if it had only surfaced in her mind at the very end.

She’d flown to the Draig to do the exact same thing once. She had failed then. She wouldn’t fail again.

“I want to be…with her again. Please.” The Ascended had killed Eriadne. Now this singular Ascended would kill Nephele to reunite them. “Call us…even,” she croaks, words struggling through the liquid in her throat.

I can give you death with the look upon my face

MAEA

"No."

Maea wouldn't stop. Wouldn't let go. She knew the pain and the emptiness and the peace that awaited the woman but she just couldn't stop and let this life flow away between her fingers.

But she had no say over this. The magical gift she had stolen from the dying could not outpace the flow of blood. Only slow it, prolong the inevitable. And all too soon, even that small respite petered out and was gone, as the glow faded. It had never been hers to wield. And now it was gone.

Still Maea kept pressure on the wound. Felt the faint flutter of a heart beat in that chest, and wished it would keep going.

"I don't even know your name! How can we be even if you leave like this? Come on, stop!"

She sniffed, pleaded with the blood, with the heart, with the soul that longed to slip away. Her own injuries were forgotten, the dribbling fluid dripping from her cut unimportant compared to the wash of red that stained her chin, hands, her coat, soaking into the ground - it was just too much.

Light is easy to love
Show me your darkness

BASE INSPIRED BY ODD <3

I can give you freedom from your guilt with a flick of my wrist

The woman can resist all she likes, object and protest, but it doesn’t matter in the end. It never would have. The magic she has is short-lived and too weak to repair that which is injured. Broken. She was never capable of being fixed, well before this encounter ever happened.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, that her enemy is the one at her side in her final moments, but Nephele cannot hold too much hatred for her beyond that of her prejudice. She had given Nephele the ending she desired after all, hadn’t she? For that mercy, Nephele can extend her own begrudging kindness.

Lifting a hand, she lays it over the one still putting useless pressure on her chest. “Nephele.” Golden eyes try hard to focus on the other woman, but it’s becoming hard to do so. She can’t say more than her first name, and can only hope the Ascended will respond in kind. “I…will ask Mort to forgive you.” It’s the last kindness she can offer, and perhaps the most profound. A gesture given only to another, former follower of Ludo. A symbol to stand for the woman Maea used to be before her divine fall. Finally her golden eyes slide away from Maea to stare up into the roiling grey of the sky.

Think you can beat me home before the rain? Nephele hears her sister’s voice chime for the first time in years, an age-old challenge presented that Nephele has never once backed down from, and the dying woman’s bloody lips turn up in the first genuine smile she’s had since the last time that voice was heard. “I’m coming Eri.” It’s barely a whisper, but as she slowly exhales for the last time, there is a look of utter rapturous joy on her face. The hand on Maea’s goes slack. Somewhere in the distance, harmonized laughter rings, reunited at last.

I can give you death with the look upon my face

MAEA

"Nephele? It's a beautiful name. I'm Maea," she offered in return, smiling painfully through the tears. And flinched like she'd been stabbed herself by the words that followed. Forgiveness - did she even deserve such a thing? Could it be granted? Was it a mockery or a genuine promise - she wanted to ask, wanted to know what Nephele meant by it.

But before she could find her words, a stillness had settled over the fair features, and those expressive eyes stared into a realm that might be forever barred from her. The blood kept flowing for a while after the heart stopped, until that too ceased.

Maea lost track of how long she sat there, with the dead woman's blood drying on her hands. She waited. For the rain to fall, or for someone to come and claim this brave, cruel warrior's body. For someone to berate her, beat her, demand an explanation of what happened. The night passed, but all was still. All was silent.

In the end, it was the sun that brought her too her feet. In the pale light of dawn, on a day that remained cloudy yet wouldn't shed any tears, she dug a shallow grave with her own hands. An easy task in the loose garden soil. Maea wanted to weep more as she wrapped the slight figure in the dark rags and lowered her into the ground, but her body wouldn't let her. Maybe it wasn't how the Fae preferred it. She realized she had no idea how they honored their dead. It didn't feel enough to merely cover her... but what else could she do?

In an afterthought, she gingerly picked up the round daggers and tucked them into her own pocket. They were too dangerous to use, but she needed something to remember this by. Even though the wounds of this disaster would never allow her to forget, she still... needed this tangible reminder.

"May Ludo guide you on safe paths to the halls of Mort," she whispered over the barren patch of soil, once it was done. Staring numbly at the traces of blood and broken stems - broken like herself, in too many ways to count. "May you know peace."

Then she left. Longing to go home - or the closest thing to it she still had left.

{FIN}

Light is easy to love
Show me your darkness

BASE INSPIRED BY ODD <3