She lies with the dead.
—
Her bones are wrought of iron. His are made of paper. He says that she is made of fire. That she burns him alive, and he does nothing but crumble and fade away.
He is loose poetry and sweet words, perfumed and gilded. He is light that blazes in the darkness, footsteps in fresh snow that do not tremble between the bodies. He is strength and courage and all things that deserve to swell in her, reinforce the iron, lift her up above the clouds. He would lift her up, up and up and offer her to the maw of Zanarkand, and nothing could make more sense.
Yet it was not Zanarkand's haunted jaws that frightened her, not those dusty graveyard teeth dripping with pyreflies and yawning holes that stretched into infinity. She was a dove trained to fly up and up and up until she smashed against heaven's edge. No, nothing like that frightened her, any more.
But those blue eyes… Blueblueblue, oceans swallowing. But such poetry was undeserved. He was a bastard. A plain and simple bastard. Egotistical, narcissistic, cruel, merciless, twisted, and broken. (And she loved him) she ignored.
Nultide drifted round her skirt, the only source of soft blue light in the darkness. A baby gurgled softly on her back, and she followed the road and hoped that no one would ever see her again.
It was not those blue eyes that scared her, not the bastard shrouded in beads and sweet scented oil. It was not the words he said, not the strange, mysterious, far off way his face fell in on its self when he whispered of death and all its bounties. It was not the way he worshipped, lavished, loved an idea that was not her.
He would send those sharp nails to claw open any town, any city, any rock. He would throw people away like parasites, and whine that it was all in her name. She would sink and shift beneath the sands and he would overturn every grain. He would burn cities to bathe her feet in ash.
But that was not what scared her.
Her bright eyes scoured the darkness, desperate to find the outline of Gagazet. Finding it, she recharted her way, hurrying on boots never meant for walking down the silent road.
She trembled as the wind rushed up her sleeves. She never thought of turning back.
What scared her was the anger, the mercilessness, the twisted, broken narcissistic and egotistical things that swelled in her. The soup he made of her, the emotions she kept so locked beneath the curtain of patience, the only things her splintered mask had tried so hard to hold back.
And she was dying.
That… should have been scary, too.