Snow.
It was snowing. Simple words. All the ones she could form as white sheets tattered and fell all around her. Her breath came out in white clouded gasps. She couldn't move. She couldn't move, any more. Red. Red tattered body lying in a field of endless snow, breathing out 'damn it' as everything aches and gives.
She'd come all this way just to die in a snowstorm. A dragoon who breathed ice now instead of fire giving way to little tiny snowflakes and a callous cold, it was rather pathetic, in a way. Yet no more did the fight in her let her stand, her last snow-drunk thoughts of love and rain drizzled raisins.
Yet with all the mercy in the world she was not allowed to die yet, it seemed. She had found herself not in a bed of snow but a bed of blankets, hot water bottles propped on her chest (that wheezed and whined an awful, terrible racket) thawing her out. She clutched sheets, and let them slide through her fingers that could no longer clutch. Her hands were quivering like a young girl holding a spear for the first time, too heavy to hold but too arrogant and desperate to prove herself to let go.
Green eyes barely opened to take in the light that so offended them now, so she closed them and held them shut even when an ear flicked towards the sound of a door opening.
"You could die"
A voice like water flowed over her, and she drank it because right now all she could do was drink. She was too tired to fight and too tired to distrust like she had fought and distrusted everyone and everything until they proved themselves to her. Yet now, tired and shivering, all she could do was give herself to that voice and say,"Then I will die."
She heard him sit next to her and she prised open an eye, green like life itself but withering fast. She breathed and saw only sharp blue lines that seemed as harsh as the yellowing light that forced her eye to close. Yet despite all the sharp-straight-slicing-lines she heard a gentleness that washed over her and in the dark made her feel whole.
He told her that she was too weak to talk and for once she obeyed a foreign command and shut up. She listened to what he had to say and grew addicted to the cooling voice of the Priest as though it was alcohol. She downed his words and licked the bottom of the bottle, practically begging for more as he told her of how hard life was and the easiness of death.
And right then life really did seem like the headache he described, a busy world full of suffering that buzzed and blared in her mind as her body shivered. Her fur was wet with sweat or snow, she didn't know which but she did know that every last drop of water in her was trying to leave now - and while she could, she let his words fill her instead
Deep inside, blackness takes her vision and chewed her out. Suddenly she knew the same feeling seagulls knew as they flew out to sea for the very last time, and with those gentle, murmuring words, she was not scared. Yet she so wished he could be here. She so wished that her lovers name would stop echoing through her dying mind, so that maybe, maybe her body would give up the fight and stop shaking so hard.
Thinking of Fratley, a sudden fear came over her. A groan escaped her throat that felt like it had been burned with too much alcohol, and the sharp-straight-slicing lined priest with the gentle words went quiet so she can ask him one last request, "Please, do not let me go forgotten. Please, do not forget me."
She cursed herself for daring to ask such a selfish question. How could she expect a man she had barely met who had probably found her in the snow and brought her here to die in warmth, who had already given her enough kindness - how could she ask him to carry her memory? A voice started to gurgle in the back of her throat to raise of apologies, but stopped.
Stopped because a hand with sharp claws rested on her face.
She gave way to that hand that pushed her into a realm of pure, beating darkness. Of stillness. Of calmness. She gave way to the river of words he had told her (of life gently easing away and all the pain going with it), and felt the release he had so crowed about (and her body finally stopped shaking). She began to fade into the deep, deep blue but held on long enough to hear the most merciful words of all.
"I will not."
Somehow, there must have still been a bit of fight left in her that night. Somehow she had found herself awake, green eyes fresh as lush grass in the afternoon rain. Somehow she had managed to stumble out of bed and into Macalania temple where the priests would insist on giving her water and food. She'd been meant to go to Bevelle in hopes of finding out what had happened to her Crusader-lover Fratley, and had taken the wrong path into the jaws of a snowstorm.
She never knew the name of the priest who had waited with her and told her stories of the beauty of death, and in her shame, she could remember nothing of his face but sharp lines and burning blue.
Days later she found herself on the brink of death again.
A grassy bank not far from Bevelle gave way to the ocean. She stood with her arms spread wide open - her fingers splayed and letting the wind pass through them. Grass stirred around her, flayed and danced and swirled. Above her, Sin waited.
"Come now, you coward! Slay me now! Kill me now!"she screamed out into the ocean, wanting death because Bevelle would give her no answers and there was no answer to anything but life which had to be death. Yet Sin did not move.
"You have slayed countless others!" she said and remembered the yellow ribbon tied to her tail, the same kind the Burmecia girls tie to trees in order to remember their lost lovers or brothers - but if she is a tree then she is one full of bugs and rotten inside out. She'd lost faith. Trees do not have faith to begin with. "So come on now! Finish me while you still can you fiend!"
Yet Sin did not move.
Sin did not move, until it turned and let itself drift lazily back into the ocean.
She screamed her throat red raw with anguish, falling to her knees and pounding as though under the stone there would be an answer to it all.
And then, between the tiny bits of green grass struggling to poke through the grey stone, she finds it. Her claws touch the solid earth, and she remembers the sharp-straight-slicing-lined priest with the gentle words dipped in blue and hears them rise out of her own throat, "I will not."(die here)
She slowly began to stand.
"I will not."(fall down again) Her voice then was full of all those harsh blue lines.
If she was a tree with the yellow ribbon then she was the only living thing left to remember Fratley. Sin had taken her lover's life (later she would learn it to be his mind, worse than death itself, but for now she would curse it for his life), but Sin would not take her ribbon from her. She would not fall.
She would not give herself so willingly to death. She would fight it, because it would not fight her. If the temples would not accept her prayers and the beasts never to come to her aide then she would guard another who could. Death would bring suffering no more, death would be defeated.
"I will not forget." She said a final time, and marvelled at how beautiful the sun set was across the water, as the last bit of yellowing light stripped its way across Sin's back.