Water tasted like the culmination of sins, burning her eyes, burning her lungs. She washed up on the shore and her pain was just a step in the ladder. Her broken bones [fingers, toes, nose, tibia, ulna] collect in a pile in her memory, knitting themselves back together, harder, stronger, made for destroying. She is restless aimless purposeless, commanding a dagger she has spent hours sharpening, grinding against a whetstone. Held in place by this accumulating debt of 'you saved my life, you trained me, you own me, you scare me' to a man with fox-glint-eyes, whose voice is a steady stream of arsenic building up in her arteries, a man who she is never sure of what role he plays [father, master, uncle, unappeared lover].
She is not even sure what role she is playing, when her name is not her own.
[The name she was born with, a name tied to her heritage of those too-bright too-strange eyes, is a name she only hears in dreams, in blood-tinged screams.]
There is no moon in a sky of star-studded black, and she perches on one roof out of thousands. She is the Assassin of Ardalan, and she has no need for memories.
:::
She limps across red sand.
This is the after-affect, the ripple in the pond.
All over, her skin is a canvas of broken blood vessels, twilight skin in blues and yellows and made of aches.
This is the by-product of her conscience.
She grits her teeth and trudges on. A thousand beatings would have been worth it. The slaves- no, the people who had fled to their freedom, they were were worth every blister, every bruise.
.
At the end of this journey, the events amount to this: spidersilk, betrayal, and a way out of the debt held over her head. Maybe there is a bit of love in there too, in the looks she and Sam share, the prickling of skin and the excitement that comes from when they touch. But...
A mission goes awry.
She is clinging to air, to the sewer grate. Black water trickles past her neck, threading along strands of pale hair, cold as the touch of a reaper.
One last breath.
'Take my body home to Terrasen.'
-
Everything, in the end of the beginning, amounts to this: her lungs spit up water on those dew-slick black streets, her strange eyes blink, and she lives. She and Sam chase a madman; it ends in blood and empty ribcages, with hoarse screaming. Her master [father, uncle, brother, unappeared lover] watches on as a prison wagon holding her broken body rumbles along a muddy road, cleaning his knives of drying blood.
It flakes off brown.
:::
She has something like berserker blood in her, unkempt berserker rage that turns the dirt sticky with entrails. Her bottomless anger gets her as far as the wall, and all the hatred inside her shaking body collapses. She falls to her knees, covered in hot hot hot near-burning blood, her clothes heavy with it, ignoring the deep yells of the guards and the war song her heart is pounding out.
Whiplashes turn her back into a map of peeled skin and raw over-pouring red. They let her hang to a post until night, attracting flies. & still, she survives.
One year, one year one year one year she stays in the salt mines, chipping away at underground walls, chipping away the semi-innocent semi-trusting person she had been before they - - - before the burning memory of Sam's torn corpse.
[again, again, again, just adding to the mass grave of empty-eyed loved ones]
She chips away in the dark.
:::
They lift her away from the dark, and she watches a prince and his guard through hollow eyes. They want her to be their Champion, and the thought is so absurd her chest aches with unspilled laughter.
.
The end of this venture is heady luxuries and silk dresses, lies and hungry demons clawing at her doors, Nehemia, and magic in a place where magic has stopped working. Wyrdmarks in red dust, the ghost of an elven queen, and the silliness of balls and a love that once again will never work.
She watches a moonless night alone, criminal as she ever was. How much has changed? How much has not?
Nehemia names her Elentiya, Spirit-Who-Cannot-Be-Broken, and if she smiles a little weepily, it is from the sheer hope she feels lifting in her, spreading its fragile wings.
.
The end of this venture is Championship, being puppeted by a mad king, a strange-eyed marionette with sharp knives, all dressed in black. The strings around her limbs are tangled, fraying, and she dances along to this bedtime tune of razor-edged fatality.
One weary smile. She is wearing the wires thin.
:::
From wall to wall, smears of red. Another soul, another body to add to the count. Someone caught in the crossfire of unspoken war.
Oh, Nehemia.
:::
.
.
tbc
(also I'd like to mention this is mirrored (in a much better edited and improved fashion, if I must say so myself, at ao3. Link can be found in my profile.)