eternity & a day — bog boys v marauders, day 3
Mar 5, 2023 2:27:38 GMT -5
Post by lucius branwen / 10 — fox on Mar 5, 2023 2:27:38 GMT -5
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She catches the orange sun in the stream, mellow in the frothing current. Steam rises from the jade water, it warms her face and feels like a reflection of a fire.
So many times she's seen someone die, and not once has she been to a funeral. Ash sticks to her hands. She dips them into the water and the warm current runs between her fingers. Her seelie glows gold from her bag, humming and bubbling, and emits a gentle light.
The Mother. She can hear the way Calamity said it, with soft veneration.
Even in death, they lay at the altar of their belief, the blade of the knife pointed to their own chest. Her mother prayed too. She went through the motions of it when she was young, faced with all that divinity, but the conviction slipped through her fingers. She hadn't thought about her god for years now.
A god can exist. A god cannot. It makes no difference to her in the end.
Her hands are clean again. Her seelie swirls around in the air, and her eyes follow it up to the sky.
The smoke in the distance is dying down, streak of burning orange withering. The funeral ends.
♦
In the morning, Karl and Johnny are distinctly separated, a shift in tone from the previous evening. She observes them from the branches of a knotted tree where she spent the night on watch. Karl holds Calamity's heart, a greenish tint of rot settling in the organ. Johnny clutches a silver mirror, and the sunlight glints off it.
She climbs down from the branches, dropping quietly to the ground before them.
There was an ease to it, she thinks, how they both deftly cut into Calamity's chest, elbow-deep in gore with unwavering concentration. Killing is hard the first time. And then, it isn't. A person learns how. It stays in them afterwards, it lives where they live. They remember it. She stares at the ashes of the pyre, a blackened spot in the bright green grass.
Karl and Johnny remember.
She looks at them, they look at her. A killer knows a killer.
She clutches her weapon and starts walking.
The trees turn pale pink as they go, heavy with blossoms. That faint, lingering scent that was carried in the wind becomes cloying in its full force. And just like yesterday, a fog comes and it rains. This time, they open their umbrellas and watch the lightning strike in the distance. The sun returns. The petals look pearlescent with dew. The smell of flowers gets heavier with petrichor.
It's Karl that stops first, hearing the voices of other tributes. From a distance, Yael can make out three figures approaching. They get a little bigger and she bristles, staring at his face.
The boy from One, perpetually smiling but not, with his cavalier attitude, his endless talking, all those big words he'd said to her on the roof the night she sat on the edge, contemplating. She draws the glaive up.
He's got the ease of a predator.
She thinks of yesterday, how the sword entered and twisted, done in a blink, Calamity gone. Her grip tightens, fractured arm aching.
She locks eyes with Dyno.
At the last second, she looks away, turns and thrusts the tip of the glaive at the girl beside him.
yael attacks rene | naginata (glaive)
efQfCpCT1sglaive
13185 -- Miss
accuracy, day 3
glaive
13183 -- 8.0 + 1 blades
