'You cannot bury your past forever, Lina. One day, you have to stop and smell the smoke.'
He had her father's nose.
The boy was lithe and tall for his age - which could have been no more than fourteen - with blonde hair that was ragged and unkempt. His eyes shone with a candour that was at once familiar and strange. She watched him stride through the Misrulian sand dunes towards her in a deceptively casual manner, even as currents of torrid steam and billowing smoke draped him from the burning crater he had just emerged from.
This was not how she remembered it.
She remembered ash. She remembered white light and painful noise, and eyes that were trembling in fear. Instead there were words.
Instead she met his uplifted, barely-singed brows with a frown. "There's only one other person I know who can walk through my light strike arrays unscathed," she said.
He merely chuckled, a frosty-white mist lacing his breath to mingle with the streams of black smoke, and his voice lowered to a smug baritone, "Perchance, might she be an ice mage as well?"
She hissed, "You know nothing, stranger."
"I know the reason why they banished you here to the middle of nowhere," he replied, and for a terse moment he regarded her unblinkingly before he uttered the dreaded words: "I know it's because you're a bastard child."
She froze.
The feeling. That she remembered. A sensation of sinking deep down, like she was a rock carelessly thrown and plummeting into a dark well. It felt like drowning. It felt like suffocating. It felt old and familiar and . . . buried.
Even after all these years, those words had never felt less painful.
She hid her telltale ticks across her suddenly stiff frame as best as she could, but it was too obvious. Her veneer had cracked.
There was more.
"You were born out of wedlock. Rylai and I turned out an ice mage. We both took to our father's side. But you?" the boy chanced a pitying look at her, "Your heritage was from an illegitimate love, one both visceral and otherworldly. Was that why they had you shipped here so quickly the moment you started manifesting your powers? I don't know. I don't care. I'm your brother, no matter who your other father is. That's why I'm here." He murmured softly in a whisper that walked chilly strides up her spine, "You cannot bury the past forever, Lina. One day, you have to stop and smell the smoke."
The coils in the pits of her stomach tightened sickeningly at his remark. Something inside made a noise she'd never heard before, curling in on itself and going dark.
"Leave," Lina grit her teeth. The words were quiet; hollowed out of any emotion or reason. She stared at him, but didn't see him, didn't see anything at all. Her mind had descended into a lightless abyss that she had never truly acknowledged, "Or I swear, I will strike you down where you stand."
Sleep proved elusive for Lina that night. Her dreams wandered back to memories from the past, playing and replaying them back in her mind like a broken Keen Folk recorder. Memories long buried that the stranger had resurfaced.
A bastard child. Those had been her father's parting words before she was left all alone in Misrule.
No place laid claim as the graveyard of more skeletons and relics than Misrule, the place where sand buried all, unveiling them only at times by the wind of roiling desert dust storms. She remembered tripping on ivory mile-wide bones of dragons when she had first arrived. She also remembered holding back tears.
Lina had let the pain of betrayal boil in her veins and burn in her gut until the heat had cauterised her very soul, until she had felt it blazing tightly against her chest, yearning for release. And she had let it out. She had screamed and screamed to herself; to the world. She had burned effigies of the people she once called 'family' in a carthatic ritual, waiting until they had smouldered to a crisp so she too could dispose of them like ashes.
It had sparked a fire within her that day. She had chosen to bury her past deep beneath the dunes of Misrule, and upon them, place a crucible to forge her new identity. She would become the Slayer. Folklore would sing the tale of Lina the Divine Solar, unthroned from her mizen roost by jealous lesser celestials. Not of the bastard child.
Lina awoke to the scent of smoke, and as her eyes made out the shapes of fiery tongues in the dark across the curtains and tables, she realised her room had yet again become a victim of her fitful sleep-casting. Drowsiness no longer suffusing her, she got up to fan them out, and went out for a stroll.
There was no sight of the mysterious visitor from the day before. When she scoured the desert, he was gone. Had it been but a dream?
She would try to forget. She would forget. The past was dead. Long live the Slayer.
The night storm wailed on, undaunted. As the layers of sand began to peel away, a compost of scorched bone and flesh unveiled itself in the dunes, shriveled by the endless heat, and sprawled baking. The corpse was old, several years by the looks of it, and yet all this while it had barely been several feet below the surface. Lina wondered how it had managed to stay buried like this for so long.
Something about it attracted her closer scrutiny, and she knelt over to examine the face.
She recognised him.
Just as quickly as it had been unveiled, the wind blew to conceal it once more. She had glimpsed it only for so long: a blink, a heartbeat. Yet it was all she needed to see . . .
He had her father's nose.
The floodgates of her mind opened to let in the deluge of memories, all of them pouring in from that one lightless abyss of her mind that she had never truly acknowledged all this time.
She remembered. She remembered the ash, and the white light and painful noise. She remembered his eyes: no light in them, no bright spark or tremors of fear or even an expression of agonising pain. They had just been open.
The sands of Misrule buried all, but not deep. Buried, but not forgotten. They surfaced sometimes: the nightmares, the memories. The truth.
She had struck her brother down where he stood that day. The day she became the Slayer.
The howling desert wind drowned the sounds of her wailing sobs.
You cannot bury your past forever, Lina. One day you have to stop and smell the smoke.