Content warnings for war, fire, death, smoke and generally grisly things.
The smoke curls thick and noxious, like storms clouds along the surface of the ground, killing all colour, even the sickly red which is quickly drying to a black-ish brown in pools and across skin.
The Mistress walks through it, a lone standing figure, a shadow aside from the weakly glinting garnets around her throat and her wrists, colour swallowed by the smog.
The ground is treacherous, littered with limbs and glass and stone and slick with blood in places.
It doesn't matter to her. She's treacherous too.
There are people moaning around her, animal noises, low and sad and confused and desperate.
They are thoughtless creatures, especially now in death.
Twists of pale flesh are scattered here and there, most close enough that if she cared she could locate which body they came from.
A wretched sob breaks out from behind her to her right.
She turns to face it but is met only by smoke curling its patterns across a background of itself and the tightening of the leather over her fist. Her brows dip, come together in frustration.
She knows he must be here somewhere among all this destruction, crawling along pathetically in the aftermath or trying to save the paltry few lives he can.
She hunts him in the smoke, listening keenly for his double heart beat.
He always comes to ruin her plans so why isn't he here this time?
She's been walking through the smoke filled ruins for hours now. They've gone cold and even darker as the sun has set.
She's been breathing it in for so long and it hurts, scratching in a way which says she should probably be dead by now but she's got to find him, even if she's killed him.
He should be here.
Her eyes are burning and she wipes tears from them, the bitter offspring of smoke and her search.
Up rise the crumbling ruins around her, like skittish creatures, even more alien than the inhabitants of the planet had been in the thick smog.
There's an arm on the floor, limp hand facing upwards as if asking for supplication. She doesn't know where the body is.
The Mistress bends down to pick it up by one digit.
It's not his.
She lets the weight fall wetly to the ground.
Her throat itches.
It feels like people are touching her skin, dragging their fingers over it and leaving thick greasy smudges of lingering ash.
She worries, distantly, that it will never come out, the smell, inoffensive at first but sickening now, will never leave her.
Where is he?
He's meant to be here.
The only thing now is the choking of the smoke, solid around her, impermeable, lightless.
Occasionally she hears a moan, feels the shambling presence of an accursed life which had survived the horror.
She flinches away from it all.
Don't they realise she's here, their new queen, soaked in their blood?
Don't they care?
He's meant to be here.
It's pointless if he's not.
It's his job to stop her so why didn't he?
The Mistress has won the war.
She's crushed the rebellion and murdered the dissenters and drowned their last vestiges of hope.
She suffocates on the dying air.
It's not worth it without him trying to stop her.
