There were things Rose Lalonde would like to forget. Memories she wished to erase forever.
Unfortunately, death didn't help.
Rose looks herself over in the mirror. Pale skin, which hasn't seen the sun for a long time, light-violet eyes, blonde hair Kanaya likes to play with calling "Threads Of Sunlight". Seer of Light's robes, bright, orange, with a yellow sun on the chest, reminding her of her native yellow dwarf.
Almost nothing has left in this girl – almost young lady – what would remind that puppet of Horrorterrors, driven by hate and revenge.
Sometimes Rose still can hear their whispers in her dreams. But she does not heed them with reverence anymore.
She's not afraid of them. She's afraid of what they had left in her.
What appears sometimes in the mirror and looks at her with its empty whited out eyes.
What strangles her throat with its tendrils – till her chest aches, till all she can see is colorful rings in her head – while Rose, bright and shining Seer, sleep.
Thorns and tendrils surround the Seer, reach out to her, but jerk away with pained hisses, not able to withstand her Light.
The Puppet stands before her, her face turned into a porcelain doll mask. Nothing is living in her; neither her eyes, turned in ghostly white nebulas, nor bloodless pallid hands, nor still heart.
She's the only one who is not afraid of Seer's Light – she's yearning it, drinking it, planting thorns of fear in her heart.
Why are you here?
You're dead!
Your body lies on the chessboard of Skaia, far away from here, you shouldn't be here!
I am y-
And only now the Seer realizes.
There's no one besides herself.
Rose gazes at her reflection intently, looking for changes. Everything stays the same, but Lalonde questions herself – for how long? How long will it be before time and her own memories take over her?
What if her death was only a setback, a pendulum, that was set so far away that it is unknown when it'll come back?
Rose yearns for the light, avoids to come outside and spends all her time in the company of her brother and Kanaya. She clings to them like to a lifebuoy, but she cannot muster herself to accept she needs help, she needs them.
That the Seer of Light herself needs light to extinguish the remnants of darkness in her soul.
The Puppet stares at the Seer with her empty eyes again, swallows her Light greedily, insatiably. The wound in her stomach does not trickle blood anymore, only oozing something ink-black and viscous. The Seer whispers endlessly "You're the past, you're the past, you're the past…"
You're gone, you're dead, you don't exist anymore, please, leave, let me go, let me-
Her breath is taken. One of wisps coils around her feet and thorns dig into her flesh.
The Puppet speaks to her.
DON'T LEAVE ME
She speaks, with her voice, in alien forbidden language the Seer knows, but do not wish to remember, do not wish to hear any more. She tries to scream, stop, make it stop, but her voice falters. The Puppet had stolen it.
YOU ARE ME, AND YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME
The Puppet steps forward to her, and the Seer sights the tendrils around her wrists and ankles, like puppeteer's strings.
HEED THEM
HEED THE NOBLE CIRCLE
Rose Lalonde's hands are shaking but her face stays calmer than the vast blackness outside the windows. Whatever would happen, she won't deceive herself, she won't deceive her role given her by the Game. Such a shame she understood it so late.
It's the fourth day in a row Rose doesn't sleep, only drinking something resembling a coffee and giving a very Mona Lisa smile when asked if she's alright. Yes, everything is absolutely alright. The lies are donned on her pretty face like a mask, hiding perfectly a helpless thirteen years old girl who is still afraid of the darkness under her bed.
Rose becomes sensitive to the temperatures, notes how cold her precious Kanaya's hands. She avoids looking at darkened surfaces, afraid of seeing her own darkened face framed in black flames.
YOU ARE ME
That's not true!
YOU'VE GROWN USED TO LIE TO YOURSELF, AREN'T YOU
You're dead, I'm alive and I'm not listening to you anymore! Not you, nor your puppeteers!
YOU'RE STILL LED BY THEIR VOICES
I don't need you!
DON'T LEAVE ME
DON'T LEAVE
DON'T
No!
The dream shatters like a looking glass as the Seer backhands the Puppet in the face. Black thick tar seeps from the nailcuts on her cheek. Dream's shards cloud Seer's eyes, she staggers back, stumbles, trapped in tendrils, and falls, falls, falls endlessly into the deep well, bottomless, almost can see stars far above. The Seer tries to breathe in, but can't, instead of air, water fills her lungs, thick and heavy as tar. The Seer suffocates, she reaches up to the Light, her Light…
…and wakes up as she falls out of her bed. She looks at herself in the mirror and sees still bleeding scratches on her own cheek.
Rose updates notes in her book, untangling a coiled ball of fate's threads, but sometimes her mind wanders off and leaves invisible signals on the margins.
Four dots, dot, dot-dash-two dots, dot-two dashes-dot.
A laceration, a heartbeat out of pace, four beats.
Rose feels blinded. She doesn't know her companions' pasts but can see the only right way for them. She sees clearly her own past but doesn't know how to escape it.
"Remember: if you see something, say nothing. And drink to forget" says suave man's voice on a mysterious broadcast. Rose has not a single slightest clue how their radio is able to get anything in the Furthest Ring, but this broadcast had broken through the veil of static and tells stories about strange unknown desert town on a foreign Earth.
In these words of a seemingly close stranger, Rose Lalonde sees salvation.
Rose Lalonde smiles.
Today – in this unsteady fragment of time between sleep and sleep – she has a date with her lovely girlfriend. Today the Seer is dressed in a wonderful orange cocktail dress, and her ears are adorned with tiny sun earrings.
Today she didn't have any dreams. Just like for quite a long time.
A mug is clutched in her unsteady hand, and something "prehhhhtay strong" is stirring inside, fresh-alchemized. This brew makes her tongue twist, the room spin and her head light and bubbly, and because of that Rose can't and won't stop.
"Drink to forget."
Rose forgot her dreams, forgot the Puppet, forgot the Horrorterror's whispers and can't hear them anymore. She almost forgot about her date, getting instead in a half-joking science discourse with Dave.
Because… everything's fine, isn't it?
The most deceitful words:
everything's fine.