;Our Weird Makes Us Right

A brief description of Whitestone as it stands today: It is a memorial-city. A sprawling, architectural cenotaph. Every inexplicable ounce of life that exists within its pale walls exists in sheer defiance of fate. At the beating-heart center of this grave-town is a tree. A massive, twisted, starkly alive thing that seems to brush the clouds with the breadth of its reach. 

In 843 PD, this tree rips open at the base in a cleave of light. A group of people and the corpse of a girl step through, and into the sun-spattered light of this living-dead city.

They do not spend more than a day there, do not take the time to explore the veins, roots, tunnels, or alleys. When the corpse of a girl becomes the not-corpse corpse of a girl and is wrapped in the warmth of bodies this city could only ever hope to replicate, they do not venture beyond the grasp of its central roots. They do not find that the city has a secondary heart to its principal, sprawling tree.

The corpse-girl, then, does not find the stone. Does not discover the list of names carved delicately into its surface. Does not run her fingers over the clean, cared for indentations in the written-shape of her fellow corpse-people. Does not see and smell and cry over the fresh flowers lying silently on the monument’s plinth.

She does not get to kneel and gasp and read the name of the girl who, all those years ago, received a letter. She does not see, there, embraced by fresh flower petals and candlelight vigils and the light dusting of snow:

Matilda Bradbury

She does not get to mourn.

—

When Matilda was eight, her mother tried to teach her how to cook.

It was a horrid affair, their oven warming their tiny home to an uncomfortable, weighted heat even in the dense and constant wet-cold of The Parchwood. Her tiny, dirt-stained hands were scrubbed red-raw, eliminating any evidence of the day’s existence from her skin. 

She had moped and stomped and pitched an eight-year-old sized fit in the heavy heated wet-cold of it all. Her mother had taken her hands in her own as she flailed. “Matilda,” she had said, “My love, is helping me cook truly so terrible a fate?”

Matilda hiccupped, “I wasn’t done. Paprika is going to be so mad at me.” 

Her mother tilted her head, hanging like a puppet with its strings cut. “Your doll?”

”She’s a lady and I left her in the barn, Mama! Because I wasn’t done! She’s going to be such a mess. And it's not lady-like. To be so messy.”

Her mother hummed. She brushed tangly, scraggly curls from Matilda’s brow. “Well, I think any lady worth her salt knows how important feeding herself is.”

Matilda had wailed and groaned and thrown her head back. Her hair was dark, but still brown, then, as it followed the force of her spinning, expressive sway. She responded, her lips pursed in a pout, “Nuh-uh. You have to feed me, Mama.”

Her mother had laughed. It was sunny outside. Matilda had frowned even further. Her mother reached out and cupped her little cheeks,  “Okay—Alright, my darling. But soon, yes? And then you can feed me, for once.”

Matilda had grinned and nodded, and that was that. She bounced back-and-forth on her bare feet, on their creaking floorboards. Her mother smiled and tapped her on the nose. “For the record,” she said, “Even the most beautiful, beloved lady is very messy. So, go on then, make a mess of yourself again. Dinner will be ready soon.”

(And, so, Matilda did—)

She rushed back out into the open, persistent fog of the wood, made her way to the barely standing, croaking red barn on the outskirts of the patch of the world she called home, and crawled up and back into the loft where the inanimate audience of her most loved dolls were waiting. Later, as the sun began to truly set and paint the muddy, fog-shrouded mess of air around them into something more closely resembling a forest Matilda could imagine being sewn into the pages of her favorite stories—Matilda pulled her hands from the nest of her creations, palms stained ink-dark. 

(—make a mess of herself, that is).

—

When Matilda was fifteen, the hounds came.

Hounds in the sense that they howled and snarled and hunted like them, but distinctly not hounds in the bone deep, dry gashes that split them apart like a meat pie filled with steam, less of a cutting split than a bloated burst. Not hound-like in the way that the fur of one of its legs seemed a different shade and texture, like an ashen stain against charcoal. Not hound-like in the way their teeth appeared layered and chipped—serrated, almost—like a mouth full of shark skin. Not like a shark’s teeth—those were its claws, hooked at the end and sharp enough to rend the ground beneath them with their every heavy step.

Matilda first runs into them on her way back from school in Whitestone proper, dirt staining the skin of her face and her lovely new dress, tears splitting the seams and tears cleaving a path down her darkened cheeks.

It shambles out onto her path, eyes reflecting like a predator’s, sparkling like they’re too wet. The effect makes it seem like its pair of eyes are instead a cluster of eyes, like a spider’s collection embedded in its sockets. Its claws cut the earth between them, and where it cuts the ground seems to weep with pools or tendrils of shadow. She stops, clutching the hem of her dress in her bony fingers.

From the not-hound-hound’s point of view, she must look the part of easy prey. Tall, slight of frame, young, and completely on her own. It must take it by surprise when the shadows pooling around its shark-tooth paws wrap and bind it, climbing like vines of ichor through its mangy fur, curling around its throat and pulling it to the dirt.

Matilda, ten paces away, lets go of her dress. It drops from her hands soaked black, as if it had been dipped in an inkwell.

Quietly—almost shyly—she begins to cross the distance. Her footsteps do not cut the earth more than they do stain it, every footstep leaving behind a bleed of black that collects in the soil and coagulates like an old wound. The not-hound snarls, tries desperately to force its way out of the bind and by her tenth step—it quiets.

She kneels in front of it, extends a hand out as if to soothe and then seems to physically shake the thought away, pulling her hand back towards her knees and chest. She tilts her head. “Oh, that’s fun,” she says aloud, “That’s not your leg, is it?”

Its front-most left leg—ashen gray—begins suddenly at the bend of its chest and shoulder, separating the limb from the rest of its soot colored body in a sudden cut of color. Again, she starts as if to touch or pet or soothe, and then thinks better of it.

”I should like to know who made you—they’ve got such an eye for detail!” She smiles, her hands coming up to frame her cheeks. “Truly, I’ve not had the thought to mix-and-match bonework before. You’re really something special.” 

The hound studies her. Its eyes are snow-blind. Matilda hums.

”Oh,” she starts, lifting herself back onto the balls of her feet, “I wish you were kind. I’d bring you home if you were. You’d have so many treats and scratches—the good kind of scratches—but, you’re not, are you?”

The hound tilts its head. Its clouded eyes blink slowly up at her. A spear of ink shoots out from beneath her feet and semi-solidifies in her grasp.

”I’ll make it quick.” She promises. “It’s not your fault that you’re hungry.”

The hound huffs. Its head falls limply into the mud, as if waiting, as if intelligent.

”Huh,” Matilda says, “Neat.”

Her shadow pierces the throat of the not-hound in one fluid thrust. As its body is released to lie limply in the mud, its milky eyes blink one final, appraising time—and then seal shut.

—

When Matilda is twenty, she receives a letter.

—

All things considered it is somewhat of a small miracle that it took until Laudna was fifty–or perhaps more accurately twenty and thirty–to give in to her own autophagous body.

In the words of her mother: Any lady worth her salt knows how important feeding herself is.

Bor’dor was a crumb of sustenance, a sip of something cool after decades of ceaseless drought. There is still an ache associated with his death that will likely never leave her entirely, something like guilt and something like resplendent relief. A little like satisfaction. The thought of him is always followed with a low growl; though whether that is the hunting beast in her chest or the warning, begging call of her own hunger she is not certain.

In comparison to his fading and broken soul Otohan’s blade is like drinking straight from the source. Like nectar and honey, sweet and sticky and sluggishly thick in her veins.

They are alike in but one screaming, cleaving way. Like Bor’dor, the mouth-wateringly sweet sensation dripping through her chest is matched only by what follows it: an aching, sharp reminder of emptiness.

One moment she sees Imogen’s face–Imogen, her Imogen–and the next she sees the desaturated kaleidoscope imprints of color behind the lids of her own eyes as power feeds into her chest–and then it's Imogen again. And in the reflection of her distraught eyes she sees it. Herself. As she truly is. As she has likely always been.

It makes her think, for the first time in thirty-five years, of that hound. Delilah’s hound, she knows now. Its mismatched bones and mismatched skin, its aching teeth, its dripping maw. That is what she sees staring back at her in Imogen’s eyes. A salivating mouth. A barghest.

Imogen looks at her—for the first time in all of their time together—with something like distrust and all Laudna can hear is the echo of her own young voice moments before putting the desperate thing out of its misery. It’s not your fault that you’re hungry.

—

She thought, if anyone, Imogen would understand. She doesn’t.

Once Imogen clears the lip of the roof on her descending way back to their collectively shared room, Laudna falls into the shape of a curling wraith in the dark. She wraps her long, wiry arms around her knees and buries her head in the bend of her elbows.

Distantly, a bell chimes. A far away death toll. As if called by its wail, Delilah’s gentle voice rings, They can never understand what we’ve been through.

"She hates me because of you." Laudna hisses, "I think I might, too." 

Delilah clicks her tongue disapprovingly. It echoes in the confines of her skull. Come now, surely you wouldn't doubt her. You can no more rid yourself of love than you can rid yourself of me, dear. Despite our combined best efforts.

The sentiment cements itself in Laudna's chest, ossifying her sluggish heart. It makes her sick. It makes her tired. Delilah continues, And I've not made you do anything. Let us not act like you were not starving. What have I done but indulge your hunger?

"She didn't want me to." Laudna snaps—not unlike a territorial hound, hackles raised at the sight of the hand that feeds. "She didn't want me to. She loves me. She didn't want me to." 

Delilah does something that feels like an almost teasing bite at the heels of her running brain. How could you love something and also allow it to starve?

A sound like a whimper or whine escapes her throat. “She loves me.” She whispers. “She didn’t want me to.”

Delilah pauses. The silence feels twisted, warped. Laudna thinks she might be tilting her phantom head, appraising her, deciding whether best to punish or praise. She can tell because when Delilah tilts her head it feels a bit like her skull is about to explode to make room for the shift. And then, with a calm that suggests she wasn't paying much attention at all: In that case, perhaps you should ask yourself when a tether becomes a leash?

She thinks of Imogen’s hand in hers on the Silver Sun, eyes like the sky at sunrise. She thinks of Imogen’s warm lips pressed against hers in the bustling marketplace of Jrusar, of her hands pillowing her face in the aftermath. Imogen’s beautiful, understanding smile. Her voice saying, Power’s very tempting. And I won’t judge you either way.

Imogen in Zephrah, taking a secret, stolen moment with her on the cliffside. Imogen’s hand in hers. Imogen’s voice, I asked her to bring you back—I asked for help. I prayed to her like she was a God.

Imogen in Whitestone, tears carving her cheeks. Imogen’s voice, I’m gonna try my hardest to make that not happen, alright? 

Imogen in the Feywild, in the trust trials, desperate and aching and sad. Her voice, again, I’m disgusted by the thought of her watching us all the time.

Imogen’s body lifted from the Ruidian soil, glowing a vibrant red. The smile on her face, euphoric. Imogen and Fearne, their bodies or maybe their souls connected—tethered—passing magic between them like sips of water. Was she thirsty? She didn't ask. Laudna would have gotten her water. She’s done it before. So many times.

Laudna sobs, “If it is a leash I’m not the one being held back.”

Oh, Delilah says in a voice that sounds almost as if she were genuinely commiserating, You poor thing. You’re still much too hard on yourself. She loves you, does she not?

Imogen’s voice in The Volition’s hideout on Ruidus, Does that change the outcome? If she’s helping Ludinus, does it matter if she loves me?

”Does it matter?” she cries. “Does it matter if I am a dead end, regardless? She hates you,” she pauses to inhale, the night cooled air passing through her throat like hundreds of tiny knives, “so I will not condemn her to me.”

There is a sweeping sensation in her skull. Pins and needles. Delilah is shaking her head. You’ve still so much to learn, dear.

Laudns sniffs. It’s gross. She’s gross. She should really keep a thing of napkins or wipes on her. For the ichor. “What do you mean?”

The web in Laudna’s brain vibrates as if plucked. The vibration travels through Laudna’s body and into her lungs, forces her into a gasping cough of a sob. Delilah’s spider fingers crawl along her seams in search of prey. You have condemned no one that wasn’t condemned to start.

”Shut up.” She says in an animal hiss, “Shut up. She’s not condemned to anything—”

Anything, Delilah says simultaneously, their voices overlapping, that she has not chosen to condemn herself to, yes.

Laudna shakes her head, her stringy loose hair brushing like spider legs across the back of her neck. “No.” She grits. “No.”

No? All love is a condemnation, of sorts.

Tether. Leash. “You're the condemnation.” She spits, “If you weren’t here—“

Delilah laughs shockingly loud, at odds with her usual sangfroid. Is it truly so fragile for her?

”What?”

Delilah hums and it sounds like a thousand clanging church bells resonating at once. It makes the spider’s web in her skull tremble in response. Darling. Were the roles reversed, would I scare you away from your devotion?

Laudna shakes her head. “Imogen loves me.”

Yes, Delilah chuckles, like she is consoling or tolerating a child, in the way that she loves how you love her. Tell me—all of those nights you woke up to hold and comfort her in the wake of her storm—would she weather yours with you, as well?

”Of course.” Laudna’s reply is immediate. If anyone else might have been listening in they could have mistaken it as defensive, maybe, but—no. No, there is nothing to be defensive of. “Of course she would. She loves me.”

Delilah hums again. Something in her brain is fighting valiantly against the webs and the fingers and the bells. And then the multi-layered susurration of her voice: Then where is she, darling?

Delilah finds the fighting thing first. She sinks her fangs in.

When Laudna picks her ink-stained cheeks up from her knees she is, horrifyingly, all alone. When Delilah’s fangs pull away from the decaying corpse of a piece of a part of Laudna—they are dripping venom.

And when Fearne’s voice rings out, breaking the settling silence of the night with a soft, ’Laudna?’ she feels Delilah skitter away into whatever corner she hides in, whatever corner of Laudna’s brain is not her own.

—-

Later that night, once a relative calm has once more settled over their shared space and Imogen’s relatively stiff body climbs into their shared bed, Laudna stops breathing. An attempt at being considerate and considerately invisible. Imogen doesn’t comment on it, though Laudna knows she notices. Or maybe she just hopes she notices. She’d notice it, were the role reversed. 

Her teeth fit together tightly in her mouth, clenching. That horrid woman. Her wretched words.

And yet, still, Laudna finds herself wondering hopelessly at the truth of them.

Delilah lies. All the time and in innumerable fashion. As often as she lies, though, she tells the truth. She has always been a cornered animal, identifying and utilizing with immediate efficiency that which she thinks will benefit her survival most effectively. Which was this: an outright lie, or a manipulative truth?

She doesn’t know. Maybe she never will. Behind her, Imogen inhales a deep breath that shakes on the exhale. Laudna’s heart clenches in her chest. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Laudna loves Imogen regardless of the magnitude in which it’s returned.

Would Delilah call that pathetic, or would her devotion impress her?

Following the clench of her teeth comes a contortion of her brow as they scrunch together in wrung-out, bone-deep exhaustion.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. What does matter, Laudna realizes, is that it’s unfair.

Not to her, but to Imogen—who she is beginning to realize has not been given the chance to prove Delilah wrong.

She knows Imogen’s breath, the stutter of it if she’s having a nightmare, the tense of her neck if a migraine is about to set in, the clench of her jaw when the voices become too overstimulating, the way her breath shakes on the exhale when she is trying to hold back tears—because Imogen has allowed her to see it. Because brave, beautiful Imogen sits with her ribs and heart bleeding from her chest every day for Laudna to pick apart as she chooses.

And Laudna, in return, has only ever shown her the aftermath. The scars, the stitching, the mended threads. I’ve seen all of you, Laudna.

A trembling, damning thought: that she has not.

When she wakes in the morning to lightning threaded fingers interwoven tightly between her own, she isn't sure whether it's an admission of defeat or declaration of stubborn, bleeding intent.

And if it is the latter, she worries whether Imogen has realized it—that the thought of her love being something that bleeds makes her teeth ache.

—-

There’s no time. There’s never time.

They leave that morning, set across the tundra of Eiselcross in search of FCG’s home city. What happens next is a bleary blur of passing hours and tense traversal and thoughts of how to fix the things she’s broken so rapidfire in her brain that it almost gets her killed as her brain trips and her foot follows and then, finally, with the creaking branches of her mind snapping entirely.

The time Delilah spends at the wheel exists in the same way the world still exists when you close your eyes—lapped in darkness, lacking any form but the print of an impression—nothing concrete but for the simple knowledge of fact that the world did, still, exist. That it would be there when she could wrest control of her own eyes again.

When she did—and this is arguable, whether or not “she” did and not her capable, beautiful family—the world was indeed still there. She opens her eyes to Imogen’s desperate, tear-stricken face, her chapped lips shivering, her lavender eyes swimming and searching. Laudna’s first thought is that she should have brought another coat.

”That can’t happen again,” Imogen whispers tremulously. Her hands are traveling all over, unable to sit still on Laudna’s bleeding body, drenching them in ichor and blood. Some of the bleeding, Laudna knows, was done by Imogen’s hands. I love you, she had said, I’m trusting you. “Laudna. Laudna. That can’t happen again.”

So, Laudna had thought with no small amount of misery, it wouldn’t. 

She had just about made up her mind on a number of things ranging from leaving altogether to suggesting they just keep her in the hole until they need her—it isn’t like she’d be able to break the barrier anyway, what with her atrophied muscle—to begging, pleading to not be left behind, to at least escort her out of this wretched place before—when Ashton brings forth the pinion.

The Pinion of Service, it’s called. There’s something in the back of her head that laughs at that.

The time it takes to get to Essek’s home and formulate a plan passes, again, in an unrecognizable blur of smeared color and voices. She can only stare at this thing that is meant to liberate her, this purple stone Essek is now saying will need to be placed physically within her. That it’s not a guarantee. That Delilah could still take her.

They’re given a handful of hours after that.

For the most part they race around, immediately set out to find ways to make themselves useful for the coming battle. She’s not sure what they’re doing, really. She is still staring at that rock.

What are you doing?

”Laudna?”

You lied.

I’ll fix it—We’ll fix it.

A hand lands on her cheek, suddenly and softly. A gentle strike of lightning. Imogen. “—are you alright? Laudna?”

Her response comes instinctively, bursting from her mouth well before passing through her brain, “Oh, yes. Perfectly fine. Are you alright?”

Imogen’s hand doesn’t leave her cheek. Laudna can see the minute twitches of muscle in her face that mean she is making a valiant and active attempt at appearing neutral. Were she anyone else, she’d be doing a marvelous job. “You aren’t…” She starts, losing the words and picking them up again, “…aren’t nervous?”

Her response comes, again, instinctively and without permit from her mind, “Oh, yes. I’m terrified.”

Imogen makes a noise at this that, like Laudna’s runaway mouth, seems unintentional. It sounds like it should be a wail; like Imogen reached down into some hurting part of herself and smothered it a moment too late. In so doing, she briefly loses the control over her passive expression and Laudna watches her eyes blink rapidly to fight a sudden onset of tears.

In spite of her loose mouth, it would be wrong to say Laudna lifting her hand to cup Imogen’s cheek was a thoughtless action. It would be more accurate to say that loving and comforting Imogen is her natural state of being. It is thoughtless only in that it is instinctive; it is what she is meant to do. It does not shock her to find her hand where it belongs, more at home on Imogen’s skin than attached to her own body, in the way that sometimes her own words take her by surprise.

What does shock her is her next thought, that Imogen might not want Laudna to touch her like this.

It is the first time she’s touched Imogen like this in too long. Others may call this a dramatic thought—a mere 24 hours—but those poor people don’t know Imogen and they certainly don’t know Imogen like Laudna. There’s a part of her that thinks you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows or loves anyone like Laudna loves her.

Her palm feels simultaneously numb and over-sensitive with the joy of it. If Imogen doesn’t want her to touch her like this anymore she thinks she’ll die. Or have to cut off her hands to spare them the ache.

”I’m sorry.” She whispers. Her thumb runs over the curve of Imogen’s cheek. “Was that the wrong thing to say?” 

Imogen shakes her head. “There is no wrong thing to say. Not about that. Not about this.”

Laudna doubts that. “I was thinking about the gnarlrock.”

Imogen blinks hard enough that for a moment it brings her entire face together in a swirl of disbelief. “Oh? I—yeah, It’s—We’ve gotta stop fucking with purple rocks, huh?”

She smiles. “Yes, well, hopefully this one will work in our favor.”

Imogen laughs lightly, tremulously; she laughs as if the consequence of not laughing is sobbing. It is one of the few Imogen-sounds that Laudna swears to become less familiar with. “Yeah. Yeah, hopefully.” 

She pauses. Laudna watches her search for words, sees one escape her mouth and her tongue follow in a stripe across her lips, sees another catch in the twitching not-quite-furrow of her brow, sees more pool in her arms as they come to the familiar cross over her chest and stomach. If the rest of Laudna’s life was just this—watching Imogen think, watching her put together puzzles in her brilliant mind—she could be content. Whether the rest of her life encompassed the next hour or not.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      And then, a new shock, Imogen doesn’t find the words at all. Or finds them and discards them. As Laudna watches her drop the search and settle into silence, she realizes she is not the only one that feels as if she is treading water in an open sea. Imogen must also feel it, that threat of any word being the one to pull them under.

That can’t happen again.

”I’m sorry. For that night.”

Imogen’s voice is a rough whisper when it leaves her throat, “The—the night with the gnarlrock?” 

“Yes.”

”I thought we already apologized for that night.”

She shrugs. ”Still, then. I’m still sorry.”

”Laudna,” Imogen releases her name in a sigh, “Don’t.”

Laudna’s mouth shuts with a loud click. She’s sorry for that, too.

Silence settles over them again, heavy in a way it has only been once before. Laudna hates it. Hates the oppressive, suffocating feeling of it and the knowledge that its weight is one she wrest upon them both. Hates that she may only have an hour left to live and she’s spending it with this woman she loves with more ferocity than there are words to convey in this stilted silence. 

It hits her, then. Her lack of time. She turns her face to Imogen, who is staring ahead and working her jaw. Has it hit her, too? It wasn’t so long ago that she was asking Imogen to do this, to be the one to put her down if what came to pass came to pass. It wasn’t so long ago that Imogen crossed continents and planes of existence just to give her the chance to choose to leave her.

”Could I show you something?” Laudna asks. Imogen tilts her head. Her eyes are a weighed-down noose. Laudna whispers, “I don’t know how to say it.”

Imogen straightens her back enough that when she responds she is looking down at her, if only slightly. “Of course, Laudna. Do you mean—“ and she taps her temple with two scarred fingers.

”No, no. I actually—“ and now she straightens, her spine unfurling like rolled parchment, to reach into her bag. When she finds what she’s feeling for, she pulls it out slowly.

At first, Imogen is confused. For a brief moment Imogen is really confused. And then the past few weeks seem to rush back into her mind and she recognizes it—Ashton’s bullshit magical pipe.

”They gave it to me when—that night. To use.”

”Your…proudest moment, yeah?”

Laudna shrugs, “Or ‘kindest’. Up in the air on what they meant, but that's not new for them.”

”No, they love that shit.”

”We should really speak to them about being more clear. Succinct.”

”Concise.”

”Exactly.”

”If we did he’d just get more obnoxiously vague on purpose.”

“That’s true.” Laudna smiles. There is a smaller, matching smile on Imogen’s face. 

“What—“ Imogen starts, “What is it that you want to show me, with this? That you can’t say?”

Laudna toys with the pipe in her hands, twisting and running the pads of her fingers over the runic inscriptions. “I just…” she starts, her voice a barely there whisper, “I want you to know all of me. Selfishly, I do.”

Imogen looks as if she’s about to argue. Laudna stops her by raising the pipe between them both. “This is it. The last piece of me.”

”I don’t think that’s true at all.” Imogen responds shakily. “I think—I think there’s things about you even you haven’t figured out yet, Laudna.”

Laudna smiles at her. What a beautiful thought. What a beautiful mind. She aches with the urge to take her hand. To feel her split-open fingers toy with the ring on her finger. Has she noticed, yet? The shift in placement. The promise she refuses to utter aloud, lest her tendency to break them rear its head. If she has, she has yet to allude to it.

”Maybe.” She responds wistfully. “Still. I would like to show you. I would…” she trails off, fighting back a sudden rise of emotion in her chest. She swallows. “I would like for someone to…to know. In case. You know.”

”I know.” Imogen cries—because she is crying now. Silent, soft rain on her cheeks, the closest thing to an admission of terror and love she’s made all day. And then, miracle of miracles, Imogen takes her free hand into her own and holds tight. “I know.”

She tightens her grip on Imogen’s hand to what she’s sure would be a painful degree for anyone with less atrophied muscle than herself, but is likely just a mild squeeze as is. “Thank you.” She whispers.

Imogen lifts their hands to her tear-stained lips and presses a kiss to their combined joints. She says nothing.

Laudna brings the pipe up and into the light. With a flick, the runes begin to glow. “Well,” she grins, “bottom’s up.”

Imogen laughs against her hand. “Yeah. Bottom’s up.”

She takes the smallest of moments to close her eyes and memorize the feeling of Imogen’s lips on her skin, her laugh in the air. And then, holding tight to those images in her mind, she inhales.

Inhales.

Holds.

Exhales.

The smoke leaves her mouth with a quiet hiss. It gathers in front of her nose and dances in front of her face in many monochromatic swirls. Beside her, Imogen holds her breath.

As the last waves of smoke leave her lips, it gathers in a tight, twisting ball in front of her and then expands—gently, softly—into the vague approximation of shapes and then people and—

The image in front of them is a familiar one. Matilda—who still looks like Laudna, if Laudna were made of a bit more meat and a bit less bone—sits at a dinner table. It’s a smaller one than the dinner table, and though the smoke does not capture the detail Laudna knows which of the four seats surrounding it are missing a leg or chipped to the point of scratching. She knows which of the seats the apparition of her meat-body will choose, just as she knows the vague silhouette of a person entering the scene is her mother, whose hands had been dirtied and frame had been thin and who moved, at that point, with very little of the grace Matilda remembered her harboring when she was younger.

Her mother sits across from her and leans in, exhaustion pulling her bones into the wood and her skin towards the roots. Matilda is talking, hands shooting around expressively like a gnat, as another silhouette—stockier, his torso almost a solid block of smoke—sits next to her mother. She remembers that her father had leaned forward onto his elbows, wringing his hands on the table. Matilda takes a deep breath that shifts her spine of smoke into an almost straight line and then reaches towards something on the table.

She lifts the smoke from the smoke. In her hands is something small and rectangular.

Next to her, Imogen whispers: ”Oh.”

Matilda takes the letter into her hands and without much grace rips it open at the seam. Laudna notices that Matilda’s parents seem to flinch at the action. A few moments pass of her reading, processing, and then Matilda shoots upright. She’s pointing at the letter with one hand and though the smoke, again, does not capture the detail—Laudna knows there is a smile on her face.

”A dinner,” Laudna narrates quietly, as the smog continues to play out the scene in silence before them, “They must have seen something, Mama. They must have seen something in me. I was chosen.”

The smoke stills mid-scene—and then loses its weight entirely, dissipating in the air. That’s fine. Laudna doesn’t really remember the rest with nearly as much clarity.

Imogen is silent next to her. It feels like she is the farthest from her she has ever been and the closest she has been in days. Eventually, she whispers, “Laudna…”

“Even now,” Laudna starts, “Even now—my proudest or kindest or most heroic moment—whatever the fuck Ashton said this thing does—it’s this. Even knowing…do you see?”

Imogen doesn’t move. Laudna doesn’t lift her gaze, not strong enough to witness what damning expression is on her face. “See what?”

”Me.” Laudna chokes, “That’s the end of my life in my hands. Of my parents’ lives. The life of a little girl and her family. Of some fucking—innocent fucking bear, I think, and i’m still—Imogen. It meant I could become something. Something more than some…” she pauses to gather enough venom in her mouth to properly spit the next words, “…some hedge witch.”

Delilah is still temporarily sedated somewhere within her, but Laudna swears she hears the reverberating echo of her depraved chuckle along the rotting walls of her mind at the words. At the reminder of them.

But it’s the truth. She feels the sting of it in her chest still, sinking like teeth into the viscera of her. Maybe Matilda would have chosen better had she known; but, Laudna knows she wouldn’t. If told, here and now, to make that choice again—then damn them. Damn her parents and that innocent family and that bear and herself. Damn everyone who would keep her from this.

Imogen’s hand grips tightly to her shoulder, almost shaking her. “You don’t mean that.” She whispers, “Laudna. Honey, you don’t mean that.”

Laudna lifts her swimming gaze to meet Imogen’s. She grasps at her wrist. Damn everyone who would keep her from this. “Yes, I do.”

Imogen seems unable to process the words, blinking rapidly at her with her mouth hanging slightly open. As if Laudna hasn’t spent every day for over two years reiterating her devotion, her reverence. It doesn’t surprise her. She has tried to keep this part of her love, this part that is taloned, hidden away with purpose. 

It isn’t that Laudna thinks Imogen loves her any less devotedly, any less reverentially; Laudna may not understand it, but she knows that if Imogen were a more selfish person her own love would be just as barbed. Sharply filed. That’s the real issue. When you break it down to its simplest, core problem it isn't that Imogen loves less wholly; it's that Imogen is a better person than Laudna is.

Delilah lies. Except for when she doesn’t. She is not condemned to anything that she did not choose to condemn herself to.

When the day comes and Imogen is asked that inevitable question—your life or the world’s—no matter how much she rages and wails against even the concept of it, she knows in her bones what Imogen will pick.

Laudna may have been making decisions of her own lately with the intention of the “greater good” somewhere tangentially in her mind, but more than that it was this same indelible, innate desire. She consumes Bor’dor’s soul and even through the thick grief of it she feels relief. She consumes what remains of the Willmaster’s on Ruidus and is filled, however briefly, with that same childlike excitement of picking up a letter that will change her life. She consumes Otohan’s killing dagger and her heart beats for what feels like the first time.

Finally, she admits: “I don’t want to lose it all.”

Imogen’s face trips into something akin to despair. Laudna takes her hand. “But, more than that—more than anything—I don’t want to lose you.”

Her final admission: that her love for the world exists only as a refraction of her love for Imogen.

Imogen’s breath leaves her in a stutter. She blinks rapidly. Her eyes are wet, but not yet or no longer leaking. Laudna takes her in unflinchingly, allowing herself what may be a final moment of selfish, feverish desire. It should feel weighted. Instead, Laudna feels as if she could fly, so light is the weight in her chest.

It is then that she notices the lack of a catching gleam on Imogen’s brow and feels the press of cold metal somewhere against the skin of her thigh, where one of Imogen’s hands is pressed to uphold her weight. Laudna feels a small, besotted smile find her lips, trembling at the corners. She reaches out, catches and then tucks away some of Imogen’s soft lavender curls. Imogen startles at the touch.

Laudna breathes hard through her nose as their eyes meet again. Some ugly and sticky sort of soft chuckle. “You’re going to give yourself a headache, love.”

“I—You—“ Imogen tumbles over the words, wrestles them in her mouth. Laudna recognizes the look on her face the way one recognizes the clouds before a storm. What Laudna cannot decide on is if that means she should seek shelter, or if it is something they can weather.

Imogen must hear her train of thought—which, of course she can—because suddenly her focus solidifies into something incontestable. Her brow is still furrowed, her eyes still wide and wet and wonderful. Laudna is almost excited to hear her final verdict, if only as an excuse to witness that fire again.

But then, Imogen says: “My turn.”

”What—“

Whatever would have come out of her mouth is lost to the sudden flurry of Imogen across her lap, snatching the pipe from limp hands and inhaling deeply all before Laudna regains enough awareness to even comprehend the movements.

Imogen, of course, is thrown immediately into a fit of coughing.

”Oh, Imogen—it wasn’t—I would’ve just handed it to you. I wouldn’t have fought you over it.”

Imogen coughs hard into her elbow, smoke still leaving her lungs and tears in her eyes. She waves her hands in an effort to convey what Laudna assumes amounts to shut up. 

Laudna finds herself suddenly filled with a desperate sadness for all those months Imogen spent pining in silence, because more than anything in this moment Laudna wants to kiss her. Aches with the desire to kiss her. She cannot imagine the agony of this moment stretched out over the course of months. Then again, Laudna highly doubts she'd be half as endearing choking on smoke.

She does her the courtesy of focusing instead on the rising stone-grey cloud spilling from her mouth as it coagulates into an image she recognizes at once.

The smoke presents it in monochrome, but Laudna knows that field and that hill and the exact hue of pink-purple flowers that litter it like stars. She recognizes that dilapidated cabin, that crowd of slobbering people. She recognizes Imogen. She recognizes, barely, herself.

There is no sound but she knows, as clearly as she can remember the echo of Matilda’s voice, the echo of Imogen’s as her silhouette turns to Laudna’s. We’re gonna have to hold off on the courtesies until later.

She knows every moment of what comes next in perfect detail. Imogen, powerful from the first moment, turning that potential onto the crowd. Imogen taking her hand, leading them both fearlessly into some unknown. She remembers the way Imogen’s hands felt in hers that first time, still radiating static. She remembers the warmth of her voice. I just want you here, next to me.

She watches it all unfold again in front of her, utterly taken. At some point Imogen stops coughing next to her and falls silent as well. Smoke-Imogen reacts to Smoke-Laudna’s response in a way that Real-Laudna can still feel the warmth of, as Smoke-Laudna confirms this new and beautiful partnership. And with what Laudna knows are matching, final, incandescent smiles, the smoke fades.

She watches it dissipate for a moment, overcome with a desire to contain it, somehow. To take the smoke back within herself if only to hold onto the tangible memory of it a touch longer. Instead, she turns to Real-Imogen, who is already looking at her.

Her eyes are determined, if still drowning. She twists to grasp at the junction of Laudna where her throat meets her shoulder. “You see?” She whispers. “Doesn’t matter what you do. Doesn’t matter what choices you make. I’m never gonna regret you, Laudna. I’m never gonna think being with you was a mistake.”

Laudna feels pressure behind her eyes building rapidly, but Imogen continues, “I want you to see it so bad, Laudna. The way I love you—it’s—you saved my life that day, as much or more than I saved yours. You can’t—You aren’t going to convince me you’re a bad person, Laudna. You’re not.”

Imogen takes Laudna’s face in the palms of her hands, split-open fingers cradling her jaw. She pauses long enough to lick her dry lips. “You were chosen.”

Laudna nods, thick tears like a river of tar leaving her cheeks sticky. ”I was chosen.” 

”You were. She did choose you.” She concedes. Her voice trembles. “But so did I. Laudna. I did, too.”

And, really, how is anyone meant to respond to that aside from how Laudna then does: by breaking.

She collapses forward, throws the barely there weight of her body into Imogen’s arms, curls her own too-long ones tightly around Imogen's waist and back. She whispers in a hoarse, tear-choked voice, “You’re my best friend.”

Imogen, equally choked up, returns the tight grip tenfold. Laudna feels the heat of her shivering breath when she responds, “You’re my best friend, too.”

Laudna gasps against her skin, “If I don’t make it—If she wins—just—thank you. My very first best friend. My very first.”

Imogen coughs into her neck, squeezes her tighter. “Don’t forget Pâté.”

Or Bella, Laudna thinks, chuckling wetly into Imogen’s hair. “Fine.” She presses a damp, too-deep kiss to Imogen’s hairline. She says against her skull, canines grazing against her skin with every syllable, “Thank you, love. My love.”

She feels Imogen’s fingers grip like claws into the skin of her biceps and a buckling, crippling sob bury itself into her shoulder. And then Imogen pulls back, releases the hold on her arms to once again cradle her face and simply holds her there, runs her gaze over all of Laudna’s blemishes and bloodstains and ichor. She lets her fingers graze across the blades of her cheekbones, the dip of her brow, the bend of her nose, the shadow of her lips. 

Laudna does not think nor hope for a kiss. If only because she does not need it to demonstrate herself anymore. If only because Imogen loves her and that is enough.

Eventually, Imogen nods. “Thank you.” She whispers. There are still tears cutting down her cheeks. Her brows set with determination. “Let’s go set you free.”

—

When Delilah Briarwood is seventy-three—or, perhaps, forty-four and thirty-three—she watches the face of the girl she once invited to dinner fill with something like animal satisfaction as she locks her away in the hollow of her chest, right next to her still slow-beating heart.

Behind that girl’s frail ribcage, beneath her extensive collar, in front of her shifting scapula–it appears to Delilah through the filter of a purple veil of arcane glass as if she is surrounded by many undulating teeth.

—

The first thing she asks for in the aftermath–or, perhaps, the aftermath of the aftermath–is a bath.

And the bath looks lovely, really. The decor it seems Essek and his partner keep isn’t anything as ostentatious as what they had access to in Whitestone, but it’s big enough for two and the water hot enough to burn. And Imogen is there. Imogen is pouring some kind of lovely oil into the tub that smells truly divine and swirling her fingers into the mix, spreading it throughout. It rises along with the steam into the room and fills the air with the scent of something soft and floral and lovely. The light from Imogen’s scars reflects off of the undulating surface like many refracted, tiny pink-purple auroras. It’s lovely. Imogen is lovely.

Imogen is looking at her. Has been for more than a few seconds, by the concern settling into the softness of her face. Oh. Well. It isn’t like Delilah was the cause for her wandering mind. Or the ichor. If the subtle gray smear of it on Imogen’s chin is anything to go by. 

“Laudna?”

Oh! There she goes again, wandering. Always wandering, even in stillness. She should really—“Yes?”

Imogen’s brows join together over the bridge of her nose. “Do you—Are you—“

She juggles the words in her mouth for a moment, bites her lip, and then seems to give up with a sharp, sardonic exhalation of air that could be considered some type of laugh. Her head drops, hanging limp from her shoulders for a long moment before she picks it back up and levels her with a stare that is equally as soft and tender and affectionate as it is determined. Determined? Determined for what?

She lifts her hand from the porcelain edge of the tub, “C’mere, Laudna.”

Laudna does. No amount of her mind’s wandering would lead her to anywhere but Imogen’s hands, anyway.

As their hands find each other and lace together, Imogen stands from the edge in full to meet her. She brings her other hand up to Laudna’s face, uses two fingers to brush oily strands of hair back behind her ear and then, without ever disconnecting, runs them lightly over her jaw to cup her cheek in the warmth of her palm. It’s nice. Still nice. She’s glad she still runs cold. 

She’s not sure she’d trade dealing with Delilah in perpetuity for something that would diminish how Imogen makes her feel. 

Imogen smiles up at her, as if in response to the thought. Which, well, is possible. “Can I join you? I—I mean, I was assuming, but I’d like to ask—“

”Please.” She responds immediately. She hasn’t been alone since the ritual, hasn’t had a moment to really think about—and no one’s really asked, yet—about what it means—“Imogen. Yes. Please.”

Imogen’s smile stretches to display her teeth, then. She loves it. Imogen’s smile and Imogen’s teeth. She hates that so few people love Imogen’s bite. She loves that Imogen is unafraid to have fangs with her. “Alright. Alright. Here, lemme—“ She reaches down to take Laudna’s other hand as well, pulling her along gently, “Tell me if it’s scalding enough for you.” She teases. Laudna smiles. She smiles because even if it wasn’t scalding it would be enough.

Not that that matters, as she steps into the water and to her admitted delight it settles on her skin like wet flame. It draws a sigh from her lungs that is purely pleasure. She hears Imogen swallow behind her, the supporting grip on her hands tightening ever so slightly. Laudna laughs, then. “And I thought I was being insatiable.”

Imogen coughs. “Can you blame me? From nothing to you? I’m making up for a twenty-eight year dry spell over here.”

”From nothing to me,” Laudna repeats, the words leaving her in the light bounce of a laugh, “I suppose the bar was low.”

”Laudna.”

”Hm?”

Imogen rolls her eyes. It is deeply fond. Laudna can’t roll her eyes or they’ll get stuck there. She says, “You know that’s not what I meant. ‘Sides,” and here her eyes darken, “I’d argue the bar was very high. Maybe I was saving myself for someone.”

Laudna grins, lowers herself fully into the water with a deep sigh, and reaches a hand up to cup Imogen’s chin, “Oh, yes, you truly are the pinnacle of purity, darling.” She runs her thumb over the fat of Imogen’s bottom lip. Her finger comes away with a soft stain of gray. She watches Imogen’s stomach clench, sees her physically restrain herself from chasing Laudna’s thumb with her teeth and tongue. “Though, I can’t help but feel as though if I had abs we could’ve been doing this a long time ago.”

Imogen gasps through a smile, blushing and vaguely scandalized, “Laudna!”

Laudna laughs fully, reaching to take Imogen’s hand again in her own and bringing it up to her lips to press two quick, soft kisses to the skin. “I’m teasing, darling.” That’s what people do, right? With their partners. Surely Delilah—or maybe Sylas—well. She should really stop trying to be suave. She presses a third, even lighter kiss to Imogen’s knuckles and then her voice asks, even more lightly, “Get in?”

A sound not dissimilar to a whine leaves Imogen’s chest; though, to Laudna’s ears it sounds—well, firstly, beautiful—but, secondly more like something vaguely distraught than aroused. Maybe she shouldn’t find it beautiful then. If it’s distraught. There shouldn’t be anything beautiful about Imogen in distress.

Imogen stands. One of her hands runs up and over Laudna’s shoulder and then settles against the nape of her neck, where she presses lightly for Laudna to lean forward. Laudna does, feels Imogen step in behind her, and then feels strong thighs bracket either side of her body, settling into her sides. God, she really needs to get Imogen a horse. For her thighs.

She settles fully, Imogen’s stomach pressing up flush against Laudna’s naked back, her arms circling around her waist and knotting at her stomach to press them even closer. She noses at the skin behind Laudna’s ear. Laudna sighs again and whispers, “Hi.”

”Hi,” Imogen whispers back, “I love you.”

The infinite amount of hopes she could hang on that sentence. The things she could build from its bones. She could bundle it up and give it strings and a name and a form and gift it back to her. She presses back, tries in vain to fuse their skin where it meets. Turns her head to brush their noses, and their lips together, “I love you, too. More than anything.”

Imogen kisses her. It feels like it lights her up from within. Which reminds her—and she pulls back—“Could you—I’m sorry, but—“

”Anything.” Imogen interrupts urgently, pressing her lips then to the corner of her mouth. “Anything.”

Laudna hums. Her chest flickers. “I—hm—I feel. Um. Unclean, still. I think. And I don’t—“ her hands, squeezing down on her throat—her hands, running from sternum to stomach and flaying herself open—“I don’t think my hands can—will work. They’ll smear. Does that make sense? I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize.” Imogen says, and then holds her breath for a long moment. Laudna feels her eyes sweep over the whole of her, analyzing. She can always tell when someone is analyzing her, when their gaze is picking apart her muddy pieces and deciding where the worst parts or the easiest-to-cripple parts of her lie. She wonders, What do you think are the worst parts of me? Where would you shoot to kill?

And then thinks: Do you know that if you told me that I would break it within myself, that worst part? If you told me where you’d shoot I would paint you a target. Bullseye. I would never have you miss.

And then, more simply: Love me still. Please. Whatever you find. Tell me which parts of me to keep and I will tend to them. Tell me which parts to lose and they will burn. Please. I promise you can make something lovely out of broken parts.

It’s strange. In the aftermath—the immediate aftermath—Laudna was shocked to find herself filled to the brim with what she could only figure to be abundant, valiant joy. There is a contentedness now glowing purple in her chest that she did not expect and that is only now beginning to wane. There is the feeling of freedom, finally, freedom so light in her bones she could float away with it, but still there is that dreadful thought: that she stains.

She fears that if she looks for herself, if she wipes the grime and the sweat and blood and ichor away from not her body but her mind, she won’t be able to parse what dark parts were Delilah and what is just herself, as she has always been.

Finally or suddenly, Imogen presses another kiss to the portion of skin where her shoulder melts into her throat. She says, softly, “Of course. But, first—“ and shifts, hands landing on Laudna’s hips and pushing her softly, sliding her away so as to turn and ask, “Can you do me, really quick?”

Laudna takes a moment to remember what she was even responding to; but, Imogen smiles, her cheeks and throat still gray and, oh, there’s some in little shapes across her chest, too, and she had forgotten she did that—did she do that? Or did Imogen. She can’t remember.

Imogen says, more softly, “You’re not gonna stain. Promise.”

She blinks, recognizes for the second time the blank amount of space above Imogen’s brow where once a shield sat. Right.  ”Oh. Yes, of course.”

So she does. She turns to face Imogen, their legs an awkward tangle between them. She grabs the soft rag Imogen had lain on the edge of the tub and the bar of subtly scented soap besides—Imogen stops her.

“Just these.” Imogen says, pressing her thumb insistently into the center of Laudna’s damp palm. “You can—the soap is—yes, please, I am gross, but—just these. If that's okay?” 

”Of course. Of course, darling.”

So just the soap, then. She squeezes it in her hands, spreading bubbles and oil along her fingers, dips it all into the water and then repeats the process once more.

She dips one hand—the one not in charge of the soap—into the water, capturing as much in the cup of her palm as she can. She runs the very tip of her fingernail over Imogen’s navel and between the valley of her breasts and sternum as she brings it up from the surface, all the way up to her collar where she loosens her hold in a slow glide. She watches it run from one end of Imogen’s collar to the other, down her carved open chest in a quick and then catching glaze.

She thinks her own chest flickers again like candlelight in a breeze. She runs her hand more firmly over the upper-most curves of Imogen's split-open skin. “You're so beautiful.”

Imogen hums. She whispers, “So are you.”

Laudna shakes her head. Not in disagreement but in disbelief. Not of Imogen's words but of her. The vision of her. Imogen opens her mouth—likely in misplaced protestation—and as much as Laudna adores the cleansing sound of her voice it isn’t what she needs, right now. What she needs is—there—her mouth on Imogen’s wet collar, the feeling of Imogen’s jaw tensing against her hairline.

“Baby,” Imogen gasps, and then laughs, “And you were teasing me.”

“Am teasing you, arguably.” Laudna mutters against her skin, which, fuck, she just said she should stop that. The teasing. But Imogen’s breath does a funny hiccuping thing that Laudna has very quickly learned in the past two weeks means that she is doing something well. Or right. Right or well. They aren't always the same thing with her.

She leans up to press her lips to the cut of Imogen's jaw. She says, “Sorry.”

Imogen leans down; She kisses her. She says against her lips, “Don't be.” 

She tastes—it reminds her—”Oh,” she says aloud, and brings her other hand—the soapy one—up to Imogen's face as well. She runs her soapy thumb firmly along Imogen’s chin, watches the white suds go charcoal-smear gray. Her tongue suddenly feels trapped behind her teeth, like it's swollen, like it's a worm trying to break the seal of her lips for nutrients or sunlight.

She bites down on the wriggling traitor in her mouth, incisors cutting into the flesh with the sharp tang of whatever sludge runs through her veins. Later. Later. She flexes her hands the slightest bit against where they lay at Imogen’s jaw. Just these, she had asked. Just these.

She brings the very bottom of either of her palms to greet each other just below the curve of Imogen’s chin with such reverence that it is almost not touching her entirely. Which is counter. So she presses the slightest bit more, where it is more than shared water that connects them but skin-to-skin directly, and runs her soap-laden thumbs in dragging soft circles over, first, the fat of Imogen’s freckled cheeks.

Imogen’s head lulls into the cradle of her hands, eyes fluttering closed, a bird landing in the damp safety of her creaking, rotting limbs. Their noses brush; Laudna angles her head just so that she can press her lips to the skin there, as her fingers circle and circle and circle and lower, finding themselves behind her ears, now, angling her head up just so that she can press her lips to Imogen’s with no pressure behind it at all. And then lower—the dip of her chin—Laudna curls her thumbs under the sharp cut of Imogen’s jaw so that her nails scrape with a barely there presence against Imogen’s sensitive skin; it still manages to bring forth a trembling sigh from Imogen’s mouth and onto the bridge of Laudna’s trailing nose as she presses her lips more firmly against the subtle shadow below the protrusion of her bottom lip.

She leans back. Her hands drift without disconnecting, twisting, following lavender strikes of lightning and freckled constellations to where her mouth had been. The index and middle fingers of both hands press into the skin there, wiping away the still subtle smear of ichor, stretching up to run lightly over Imogen’s lips. Imogen’s eyes are still blissfully closed, head limp in Laudna’s gentle grasp. Her mouth opens against the barely there press of her fingers and her stomach does that desperate rolling thing it did earlier and this time she does not stop herself—nor open her eyes—as she tilts her chin up so that her tongue meets the lines of Laudna’s index and then further to close her mouth entirely around them and groans—

Laudna comes back to herself, eyes blinking open as if from a dream and face—somehow—buried in the storm-marked expanse of Imogen’s collar. She hooks her fingers into and under Imogen’s mandible, fingers pressing into the wriggling, traitorous worm in Imogen’s mouth as she turns her head to the side and rises back up. Imogen exhales hard through her nose. Laudna kisses her open mouth.

“Not that you aren’t unbelievably sexy,” She whispers, “like, sincerely, holy shit—but, doesn’t that taste like soap?”

Imogen blinks slowly, eyelids heavy as she processes what Laudna said and then chuckles around the joints of her fingers. When the words finally do land, Laudna watches her face scrunch together and a vague sound of displeasure vibrate from her chest. She gently grabs Laudna’s wrist and pulls it from her lips, eyes sparkling. She responds, face still a little lop-sided in its distaste, “Yeah, actually, now that you mention it. Yuck.”

“Yuck, she says.”

Imogen grins. “Incredibly rude of me.”

“Immeasurably so.”

“When you were so considerate with your hands.”

“I do try.”

“A punishable offense, one might say.”

Laudna raises a sharp, simultaneously authoritative and teasing brow. “Is that a request?”

Roses bloom in Imogen’s cheeks, unrelated to the heat of their bath. “Thinly veiled.”

They’re both grinning, their eyes taking in the other in a joyful ouroboros. Imogen’s hands lift from below the water to frame Laudna’s still-flushed face. She softens. “You know,” she whispers, “I was trying to do something super sweet and romantic and heartfelt just there and you went and made it raunchy.”

Laudna grins wider, tilts her head to press her lips to Imogen’s dripping palm. “Would it help to know that even the raunchy bits are also super sweet and romantic and heartfelt with you?”

Laudna chases a river of condensation down Imogen’s wrist with her lips, and Imogen scrunches her eyes and nose in that immeasurably attractive way in response. She giggles, ”Alright, casanova, scooch up.”

Laudna, somewhat reluctantly, does. “What’s a casanova?”

Imogen shrugs, “A bard, I think, or something.”

“You think I’ve the energy of a bard.” Laudna mock-gasps.

Imogen laughs, “I think you’ve the energy of a romantic.”

“Oh. So he’s a romantic bard. That’s the most annoying kind, Imogen.”

“Jeez,” Imogen sighs, lathering her voice with humor and her hands in soap, “Evidently, I’m not very good at the romantic bit.”

Laudna collapses forward, heavy with the mixed weight of joy she doesn’t know where to place and an emptiness she is unsure how to fill, and presses her lips hard to the dip of Imogen’s collar. “That’s not true in the slightest.”

She stays there with her nose pressed to Imogen’s now freshly scented skin. Imogen’s chest dips in quick beats as she chuckles softly against the crown of Laudna’s head and then presses her lips there. “I’ll take your word for it. C’mere.”

A hound to her call, she does. Imogen gently pushes at her shoulder to spin her around where she once again settles between her thighs. 

Imogen starts with her shoulders. The lightning fissures of her hands softly land on the bony protrusions of her scapula and undulate in waves until they meet in the middle atop the bony protrusions of her spine. Gentle, reverent, revelatory. Part of Laudna wishes for the bite of her nails.

Imogen huffs behind her and then kisses, quickly, the back of her neck, “Maybe when you're feeling a bit more settled, yeah?”

Settled is a very nice way of putting it. Imogen is being very nice about it. About that awful piece of undeniable hollowness in the wake of what should be solely freeing. That hunger that is all her own, simmering now instead of at a rolling boil. She is being so accommodating for such an ugly piece of her.

That awful little romantic bard part of her might say that’s what love is. She’s sure that awful little hound part of herself would nip at its heels until it was doing some awful jig in her mind.

She spares a glance for the layered, broken tissue marring her chest. All these parts of her she wishes to be done with. All these parts of her she can't comprehend loving. All these parts of her Imogen loves, anyway.

Imogen’s arms wrap around her, settling on the purple luminance of her heart. If Laudna squints her eyes just so, the lines on Imogen’s skin match. It makes her seem cut-through with Imogen. Intertwined. Entangled. Imogen takes her fingers and runs them gently down her alight ribs, "We'll need to keep an eye on the stitches, make sure nothing gets infected.” She whispers gently. “It’ll scar, but it'll heal."

The breath in her chest trips, like the air in her lungs was a running thing and the words put a stutter in its step. Behind her, Imogen stills. Laudna, again, feels the trace of her eyes as they follow a thought pass over her face. After a moment, she squeezes her tightly against the naturally warm, vibrant rupture of her own skin. She says again, stronger this time, "Laudna. It’ll leave a scar.” She kisses the cutting edge of Laudna’s trembling jaw and then, more softly, the permanently light ring of bruising around her neck. “But it will heal."

Yes, Laudna thinks. It just might.

There is another part of herself waking up within–neither the hound nor the awful romantic bard nor Matilda nor Delilah–something blinking drowsily awake like a newborn at the world. She isn’t sure what to call it, isn’t sure it has a name yet. It is being cradled in the mess of her mind in hands shattered by red and purple storm, slowly coaxed awake by the gentle rumble of loving thunder and the caress of open air.

She isn't sure what to call it  as it takes in the warm, safe bed of Imogen’s doting palms, but she thinks it has wings.

—

Almost two years after the scattering of the divine, four years after Imogen, twenty-two and fifty-two years after her arrival on the world, Laudna begins to feel something like peace.

She realizes this with her hand buried in Carpaccio Caviar’s thick, sticky fur, as he pants with his tongue hanging loosely from his barely held together jaw, draping over exposed bone and ligament. He looks up at her with one wet black orb of an eye and the other a glowing, magenta gathering of magic in the concave of an exposed socket. Slobber like tar drips from his heaving gums.

She knows now. Caviar is hers. Not a manifestation of Delilah, not a taunting reminiscence of that shrew woman’s view. She feels the difference now between the uncomplicated call and response of her own innate magic and the demand and force of Delilah’s. She thinks the once effortless question of power was one of her many plays, an attempt at obfuscating the truth. Now, in her pettiness, she has exposed herself. Herself and Laudna, both.

From beneath her hand he lets loose a ghastly bark, looking out at one of his favorite playmates.

Ashton, who is visiting for the first time in a few weeks but the nth time in as many months, is half-crouched in what is hip-high grass to her and waist-high grass to him with a half gnawed bone gripped in his hands. He smiles with all his teeth in that unique Greymoore-grin of his that seems more-than-vaguely angry. Behind him, in the far distance, she can just make out The Key Breaker bobbing lightly in the wind, awaiting Ashton’s return and departure.

“C’mon, mutt!” They laugh. “Fucking come and get it!”

Caviar gives a low huff and looks up at her as if saying Can I? Can I? She scratches behind his cropped ears. “Go on, then.” She smiles. “Make a mess of yourself.”

Caviar licks her hand once and then takes off, bounding after a cackling Ashton. She watches them for a few seconds, Ashton taunting him with the bone and juking left and right, before that violently sweet grin of his is back and he yells, “Get this!” and throws the bone directly into one of his swirling multi-colored portals as hard as he can. The bone jettisons from the air sixty feet away and flies even further than that. Caviar wastes no time.

“Good luck, fucker!” Ashton yells after him, stepping backwards lazily in Laudna’s direction. He pivots on his heel to face her.

“God, that thing’s the fucking coolest.”

Laudna scoffs. “That thing has a name.”

“Yeah that rules, too.”

Laudna rolls her eyes. Miraculously, they don’t get stuck. Ashton tilts their head at her, twisting the lopsided cut of their smile. “So.” They start, falling back with their full body into the dirt and grass with a loud thump. Their body breaks the threshold for a moment like one would break the surface of water. “How you doing?”

Laudna crouches down next to him gently, the maroon weave of her dress drifting in the calm breeze. The hand-stitched florals lining her skirt sway along with the grass. She chuckles down at him. “How am I doing?”

He hums in affirmation, angling his head just enough to look up at her. His green eye catches the light of the setting sun like the heath around them, suffusing his perpetually sardonic gaze with syrupy warmth. She reaches a too long, bony finger to poke their nose. Their face twists with the quiet sound of shifting shale. “I’m not the one galavanting around Exandria.” She points out.

He scoffs. When he turns his head to sit up, the sun catches his other eye and dissipates amongst the iris like heavy fog. He leans forward onto his now bent knees, his stone chin hitting the base of his palm with a soft, marble clatter. “Exactly. You’re not.”

Years ago their tone might have set her on the immediate defensive, and here still she feels the rising tide of her anger answer to their every provocation. But she knows them, and she knows now how all of their sharpness is only ever the lightest graze. They do not know how to feel or be felt softly; they are not built for gentleness. Perhaps that has always been their mutual connection. The cut of stone and the cut of bone, indelible despite every attempt to soften the blow. She’s never met another living thing that bleeds the same sluggish color as her.

But though she knows them well her voice still leaves her with the slightest of accusatory undercurrents, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His heavy hands raise up to his fractured ears in surrender. “Just wondering if you’re getting antsy is all.”

“Are you about to ask Imogen and I to go on another little bout with you? Is that what this is leading to?”

“It’s not leading to anything.” He lies.

“Will Imogen not approve? Is that why you’re asking me first?” She gasps suddenly and harshly, hands arising to her cheeks, “Do you think I’d lie to my wife?”

“No, gods, don’t fucking–don’t you dare tell her I was telling you to do that!” He says seriously, as close to real fear as he’s been since his arrival. “She’ll never let me hear the fucking end of it.”

“Then what?” She hisses, impatient. “Stop being so fucking vague all the time.”

Again, he scoffs. “You love me.”

“I would love you more if you practiced speaking with some clarity. You know, I still don’t know what exactly that pipe does? To this day, Ashton!” 

“Fine, fine.” They grunt, angling their head once more towards the setting sun. The light cuts their face into hard planes, emphasizing the minute fissures scattered across their skin. When it hits the gilded edges of their scars, it seems to drip like something molten; for a moment, both of their arms match. “I was being pretty fucking clear, though. For the record.”

“About the pipe?”

“The—oh, I have no fucking idea. I haven’t seen that in weeks. Left it with Milo, I think. Shit, I need to remember to get that back.”

“Ashton. What did you mean?”

He shrugs. “Just that you and Imogen have been here for a bit. An uninterrupted bit.”

“You’re here,” she taunts, “I’d hardly call that uninterrupted.”

“Hah Hah. Look, I’m just saying. It was busy as fuck and now it’s not. One of you sucked in a god eater a few years ago and the other—” they gesture to the hallowed lilac glow of her chest, the shadowed image of her ribs turned cage, “—the other likes to interrupt previously uninterrupted moments. Sometimes.”

She hums. “Am I the other in this equation, or…?”

They shrug again. “Take your pick, I guess.”

There is a snapping sensation in her chest. Caviar has finally caught up with his wayward bone. She sighs. The lilac blossom of her chest flutters and flickers with the motion. “It’s been quiet.” She concedes. “Unusually so. I can’t imagine what Imogen feels, after so much time with so many people in her head to have this—but, it’s quiet even for me. So it must be jarring for her as well.”

“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly had a serene head-space yourself.”

As subtle as he gets. She smiles. “No, I guess I haven’t.”

The aforementioned quiet settles over them now, soft like a shawl. Uninterrupted. He—gently as he can—elbows her gangly elbow with his own. “You’re good?”

Laudna nods. The breeze whispers across her face, picking strands of her hair up in a swirling, sunlit dance. “Yes.” She says, “I think so.”

Ashton smiles. A real smile, lacking all the violence of their usual grin though with just as much cut. They open their mouth to reply—and then get a mouthful of rotting wolf fur. “Fuck!”

“Oh, good boy, Caviar!”

—

That night, after Ashton said their goodbyes with the stubbly ground coffee feeling of their lightest and tightest hug weighing on both she and Imogen’s shoulders, she stays awake to watch Imogen fall asleep.

It is a normal night, brilliantly cool outside and redolent with the smell of freshly baked bread, carved wood, and drying paint. They carry the joy of having their family visit to bed, allow it to make their steps light and exuberant and full with the weight and warmth Laudna knows only love to bring. She dips—with the helpful aid of a thoughtfully cast telekinesis—a giggling Imogen down onto their shared sheets. She crawls over top of her trembling, sacrosanct body and presses her reverently into their mattress and doesn’t let up until Imogen is trembling from something altogether different and then falls bonelessly into slumber.

Imogen—face relaxed as it ever is, alight scars dim along with her resting mind—suspects nothing as she fades into beautiful, earned, dreamful rest.

She runs her fingers over the round curve of Imogen’s cheek, leans in to press her lips to the cut of a lavender strike of lightning splitting her jaw. She closes her eyes, inhales the vanilla and leather and ozone of the other half of her soul, and drifts—

—into the murky, thick dark of her own heart.

There is not silence but a roaring, like the underwater cacophony of the ocean that is both muffled and all encompassing. Like when you’ve yelled too harshly, too much, and your heart pressures your blood until it’s pounding in your ears. That is what it is: not silence but pressure, building.

She stands from her knelt position—how she always arrives here, as if summoned from the ground in a rising swell of ink that takes her shape—and turns to the cage casting a long, vibrant, fragmented purple gleam behind her.

Delilah sits where she always will, shackled to a wall Laudna can’t see. Her body is translucent, shifting like green flame in the shape of a lithe, desecrated woman. She stares, as she always does, directly at Laudna.

Laudna crouches down in front of the glass. She smiles in a way that feels like a gash. “Hello.”

“When I get out of here I will use what remains of your tattered soul to suffocate that woman. I will do it with your hands.”

The smile does not leave Laudna’s face. If anything, the wound grows wider. “All this time and still no nicer.”

“And then I will bring her back and I will do it again and again and again. I will throw you a thousand dinners.”

“Do you feel trapped?” Laudna questions gleefully. She leans forward to press her forehead against the glass. It paints her grey skin lilac.

Delilah grits her teeth. Frayed, loose hair falls sporadically in front of her face. She spits, “Don’t you?”

Laudna ignores her. “I keep dreaming. I’ve never dreamed before. Not like this.”

Delilah ignores her. “I will use your hands to grow new sun trees and I will use your hands to make a spectacle of everyone you love—”

“—Do you have something to do with it?”

Delilah laughs like a harsh bark. “I would never give you dreams. I would fill your mind with images of your father—do you remember him? The glint of his skin? Sylas was so steady with his hands.”

“Good.” Laudna interrupts, “Good. If it isn’t you then it’s me.”

Suddenly Delilah’s forehead is pressed right up against her own, across the glass. Her arms are pulled taught behind her, almost erupting from their sockets. She hisses, “Don’t your teeth ache, Laudna? Laudna, don’t you want to go hunting again?”

“Fuck you.” She spits, and then wakes up.

Her lips are still pressed to Imogen’s jaw, meeting her skin again and again gently like the steady lapping of waves with every rise of the other woman’s breath. Around them is quiet, uninterrupted. She presses another, more intentional kiss to the corner of Imogen’s mouth. She whispers, “Sweet dreams, my love.”

A brief description of Whitestone as it stands today: It is a memorial-city. A sprawling, architectural cenotaph. Every inexplicable ounce of life that exists within its pale walls exists in sheer defiance of fate. At the beating-heart center of this grave-town is a tree. A massive, twisted, starkly alive thing that seems to brush the clouds with the breadth of its reach. 

In 843 PD, this tree rips open at the base in a cleave of light. A group of people and the corpse of a girl step through, and into the sun-spattered light of this living-dead city.

They do not spend more than a day there, do not take the time to explore the veins, roots, tunnels, or alleys. When the corpse of a girl becomes the not-corpse corpse of a girl and is wrapped in the warmth of bodies this city could only ever hope to replicate, they do not venture beyond the grasp of its central roots. They do not find that the city has a secondary heart to its principal, sprawling tree.

The corpse-girl, then, does not find the stone. Does not discover the list of names carved delicately into its surface. Does not run her fingers over the clean, cared for indentations in the written-shape of her fellow corpse-people. Does not see and smell and cry over the fresh flowers lying silently on the monument’s plinth.

She does not get to kneel and gasp and read the name of the girl who, all those years ago, received a letter. She does not see, there, embraced by fresh flower petals and candlelight vigils and the light dusting of snow:

Matilda Bradbury

She does not get to mourn.

—

When Matilda was eight, her mother tried to teach her how to cook.

It was a horrid affair, their oven warming their tiny home to an uncomfortable, weighted heat even in the dense and constant wet-cold of The Parchwood. Her tiny, dirt-stained hands were scrubbed red-raw, eliminating any evidence of the day’s existence from her skin. 

She had moped and stomped and pitched an eight-year-old sized fit in the heavy heated wet-cold of it all. Her mother had taken her hands in her own as she flailed. “Matilda,” she had said, “My love, is helping me cook truly so terrible a fate?”

Matilda hiccupped, “I wasn’t done. Paprika is going to be so mad at me.” 

Her mother tilted her head, hanging like a puppet with its strings cut. “Your doll?”

”She’s a lady and I left her in the barn, Mama! Because I wasn’t done! She’s going to be such a mess. And it's not lady-like. To be so messy.”

Her mother hummed. She brushed tangly, scraggly curls from Matilda’s brow. “Well, I think any lady worth her salt knows how important feeding herself is.”

Matilda had wailed and groaned and thrown her head back. Her hair was dark, but still brown, then, as it followed the force of her spinning, expressive sway. She responded, her lips pursed in a pout, “Nuh-uh. You have to feed me, Mama.”

Her mother had laughed. It was sunny outside. Matilda had frowned even further. Her mother reached out and cupped her little cheeks,  “Okay—Alright, my darling. But soon, yes? And then you can feed me, for once.”

Matilda had grinned and nodded, and that was that. She bounced back-and-forth on her bare feet, on their creaking floorboards. Her mother smiled and tapped her on the nose. “For the record,” she said, “Even the most beautiful, beloved lady is very messy. So, go on then, make a mess of yourself again. Dinner will be ready soon.”

(And, so, Matilda did—)

She rushed back out into the open, persistent fog of the wood, made her way to the barely standing, croaking red barn on the outskirts of the patch of the world she called home, and crawled up and back into the loft where the inanimate audience of her most loved dolls were waiting. Later, as the sun began to truly set and paint the muddy, fog-shrouded mess of air around them into something more closely resembling a forest Matilda could imagine being sewn into the pages of her favorite stories—Matilda pulled her hands from the nest of her creations, palms stained ink-dark. 

(—make a mess of herself, that is).

—

When Matilda was fifteen, the hounds came.

Hounds in the sense that they howled and snarled and hunted like them, but distinctly not hounds in the bone deep, dry gashes that split them apart like a meat pie filled with steam, less of a cutting split than a bloated burst. Not hound-like in the way that the fur of one of its legs seemed a different shade and texture, like an ashen stain against charcoal. Not hound-like in the way their teeth appeared layered and chipped—serrated, almost—like a mouth full of shark skin. Not like a shark’s teeth—those were its claws, hooked at the end and sharp enough to rend the ground beneath them with their every heavy step.

Matilda first runs into them on her way back from school in Whitestone proper, dirt staining the skin of her face and her lovely new dress, tears splitting the seams and tears cleaving a path down her darkened cheeks.

It shambles out onto her path, eyes reflecting like a predator’s, sparkling like they’re too wet. The effect makes it seem like its pair of eyes are instead a cluster of eyes, like a spider’s collection embedded in its sockets. Its claws cut the earth between them, and where it cuts the ground seems to weep with pools or tendrils of shadow. She stops, clutching the hem of her dress in her bony fingers.

From the not-hound-hound’s point of view, she must look the part of easy prey. Tall, slight of frame, young, and completely on her own. It must take it by surprise when the shadows pooling around its shark-tooth paws wrap and bind it, climbing like vines of ichor through its mangy fur, curling around its throat and pulling it to the dirt.

Matilda, ten paces away, lets go of her dress. It drops from her hands soaked black, as if it had been dipped in an inkwell.

Quietly—almost shyly—she begins to cross the distance. Her footsteps do not cut the earth more than they do stain it, every footstep leaving behind a bleed of black that collects in the soil and coagulates like an old wound. The not-hound snarls, tries desperately to force its way out of the bind and by her tenth step—it quiets.

She kneels in front of it, extends a hand out as if to soothe and then seems to physically shake the thought away, pulling her hand back towards her knees and chest. She tilts her head. “Oh, that’s fun,” she says aloud, “That’s not your leg, is it?”

Its front-most left leg—ashen gray—begins suddenly at the bend of its chest and shoulder, separating the limb from the rest of its soot colored body in a sudden cut of color. Again, she starts as if to touch or pet or soothe, and then thinks better of it.

”I should like to know who made you—they’ve got such an eye for detail!” She smiles, her hands coming up to frame her cheeks. “Truly, I’ve not had the thought to mix-and-match bonework before. You’re really something special.” 

The hound studies her. Its eyes are snow-blind. Matilda hums.

”Oh,” she starts, lifting herself back onto the balls of her feet, “I wish you were kind. I’d bring you home if you were. You’d have so many treats and scratches—the good kind of scratches—but, you’re not, are you?”

The hound tilts its head. Its clouded eyes blink slowly up at her. A spear of ink shoots out from beneath her feet and semi-solidifies in her grasp.

”I’ll make it quick.” She promises. “It’s not your fault that you’re hungry.”

The hound huffs. Its head falls limply into the mud, as if waiting, as if intelligent.

”Huh,” Matilda says, “Neat.”

Her shadow pierces the throat of the not-hound in one fluid thrust. As its body is released to lie limply in the mud, its milky eyes blink one final, appraising time—and then seal shut.

—

When Matilda is twenty, she receives a letter.

—

All things considered it is somewhat of a small miracle that it took until Laudna was fifty–or perhaps more accurately twenty and thirty–to give in to her own autophagous body.

In the words of her mother: Any lady worth her salt knows how important feeding herself is.

Bor’dor was a crumb of sustenance, a sip of something cool after decades of ceaseless drought. There is still an ache associated with his death that will likely never leave her entirely, something like guilt and something like resplendent relief. A little like satisfaction. The thought of him is always followed with a low growl; though whether that is the hunting beast in her chest or the warning, begging call of her own hunger she is not certain.

In comparison to his fading and broken soul Otohan’s blade is like drinking straight from the source. Like nectar and honey, sweet and sticky and sluggishly thick in her veins.

They are alike in but one screaming, cleaving way. Like Bor’dor, the mouth-wateringly sweet sensation dripping through her chest is matched only by what follows it: an aching, sharp reminder of emptiness.

One moment she sees Imogen’s face–Imogen, her Imogen–and the next she sees the desaturated kaleidoscope imprints of color behind the lids of her own eyes as power feeds into her chest–and then it's Imogen again. And in the reflection of her distraught eyes she sees it. Herself. As she truly is. As she has likely always been.

It makes her think, for the first time in thirty-five years, of that hound. Delilah’s hound, she knows now. Its mismatched bones and mismatched skin, its aching teeth, its dripping maw. That is what she sees staring back at her in Imogen’s eyes. A salivating mouth. A barghest.

Imogen looks at her—for the first time in all of their time together—with something like distrust and all Laudna can hear is the echo of her own young voice moments before putting the desperate thing out of its misery. It’s not your fault that you’re hungry.

—

She thought, if anyone, Imogen would understand. She doesn’t.

Once Imogen clears the lip of the roof on her descending way back to their collectively shared room, Laudna falls into the shape of a curling wraith in the dark. She wraps her long, wiry arms around her knees and buries her head in the bend of her elbows.

Distantly, a bell chimes. A far away death toll. As if called by its wail, Delilah’s gentle voice rings, They can never understand what we’ve been through.

"She hates me because of you." Laudna hisses, "I think I might, too." 

Delilah clicks her tongue disapprovingly. It echoes in the confines of her skull. Come now, surely you wouldn't doubt her. You can no more rid yourself of love than you can rid yourself of me, dear. Despite our combined best efforts.

The sentiment cements itself in Laudna's chest, ossifying her sluggish heart. It makes her sick. It makes her tired. Delilah continues, And I've not made you do anything. Let us not act like you were not starving. What have I done but indulge your hunger?

"She didn't want me to." Laudna snaps—not unlike a territorial hound, hackles raised at the sight of the hand that feeds. "She didn't want me to. She loves me. She didn't want me to." 

Delilah does something that feels like an almost teasing bite at the heels of her running brain. How could you love something and also allow it to starve?

A sound like a whimper or whine escapes her throat. “She loves me.” She whispers. “She didn’t want me to.”

Delilah pauses. The silence feels twisted, warped. Laudna thinks she might be tilting her phantom head, appraising her, deciding whether best to punish or praise. She can tell because when Delilah tilts her head it feels a bit like her skull is about to explode to make room for the shift. And then, with a calm that suggests she wasn't paying much attention at all: In that case, perhaps you should ask yourself when a tether becomes a leash?

She thinks of Imogen’s hand in hers on the Silver Sun, eyes like the sky at sunrise. She thinks of Imogen’s warm lips pressed against hers in the bustling marketplace of Jrusar, of her hands pillowing her face in the aftermath. Imogen’s beautiful, understanding smile. Her voice saying, Power’s very tempting. And I won’t judge you either way.

Imogen in Zephrah, taking a secret, stolen moment with her on the cliffside. Imogen’s hand in hers. Imogen’s voice, I asked her to bring you back—I asked for help. I prayed to her like she was a God.

Imogen in Whitestone, tears carving her cheeks. Imogen’s voice, I’m gonna try my hardest to make that not happen, alright? 

Imogen in the Feywild, in the trust trials, desperate and aching and sad. Her voice, again, I’m disgusted by the thought of her watching us all the time.

Imogen’s body lifted from the Ruidian soil, glowing a vibrant red. The smile on her face, euphoric. Imogen and Fearne, their bodies or maybe their souls connected—tethered—passing magic between them like sips of water. Was she thirsty? She didn't ask. Laudna would have gotten her water. She’s done it before. So many times.

Laudna sobs, “If it is a leash I’m not the one being held back.”

Oh, Delilah says in a voice that sounds almost as if she were genuinely commiserating, You poor thing. You’re still much too hard on yourself. She loves you, does she not?

Imogen’s voice in The Volition’s hideout on Ruidus, Does that change the outcome? If she’s helping Ludinus, does it matter if she loves me?

”Does it matter?” she cries. “Does it matter if I am a dead end, regardless? She hates you,” she pauses to inhale, the night cooled air passing through her throat like hundreds of tiny knives, “so I will not condemn her to me.”

There is a sweeping sensation in her skull. Pins and needles. Delilah is shaking her head. You’ve still so much to learn, dear.

Laudns sniffs. It’s gross. She’s gross. She should really keep a thing of napkins or wipes on her. For the ichor. “What do you mean?”

The web in Laudna’s brain vibrates as if plucked. The vibration travels through Laudna’s body and into her lungs, forces her into a gasping cough of a sob. Delilah’s spider fingers crawl along her seams in search of prey. You have condemned no one that wasn’t condemned to start.

”Shut up.” She says in an animal hiss, “Shut up. She’s not condemned to anything—”

Anything, Delilah says simultaneously, their voices overlapping, that she has not chosen to condemn herself to, yes.

Laudna shakes her head, her stringy loose hair brushing like spider legs across the back of her neck. “No.” She grits. “No.”

No? All love is a condemnation, of sorts.

Tether. Leash. “You're the condemnation.” She spits, “If you weren’t here—“

Delilah laughs shockingly loud, at odds with her usual sangfroid. Is it truly so fragile for her?

”What?”

Delilah hums and it sounds like a thousand clanging church bells resonating at once. It makes the spider’s web in her skull tremble in response. Darling. Were the roles reversed, would I scare you away from your devotion?

Laudna shakes her head. “Imogen loves me.”

Yes, Delilah chuckles, like she is consoling or tolerating a child, in the way that she loves how you love her. Tell me—all of those nights you woke up to hold and comfort her in the wake of her storm—would she weather yours with you, as well?

”Of course.” Laudna’s reply is immediate. If anyone else might have been listening in they could have mistaken it as defensive, maybe, but—no. No, there is nothing to be defensive of. “Of course she would. She loves me.”

Delilah hums again. Something in her brain is fighting valiantly against the webs and the fingers and the bells. And then the multi-layered susurration of her voice: Then where is she, darling?

Delilah finds the fighting thing first. She sinks her fangs in.

When Laudna picks her ink-stained cheeks up from her knees she is, horrifyingly, all alone. When Delilah’s fangs pull away from the decaying corpse of a piece of a part of Laudna—they are dripping venom.

And when Fearne’s voice rings out, breaking the settling silence of the night with a soft, ’Laudna?’ she feels Delilah skitter away into whatever corner she hides in, whatever corner of Laudna’s brain is not her own.

—-

Later that night, once a relative calm has once more settled over their shared space and Imogen’s relatively stiff body climbs into their shared bed, Laudna stops breathing. An attempt at being considerate and considerately invisible. Imogen doesn’t comment on it, though Laudna knows she notices. Or maybe she just hopes she notices. She’d notice it, were the role reversed. 

Her teeth fit together tightly in her mouth, clenching. That horrid woman. Her wretched words.

And yet, still, Laudna finds herself wondering hopelessly at the truth of them.

Delilah lies. All the time and in innumerable fashion. As often as she lies, though, she tells the truth. She has always been a cornered animal, identifying and utilizing with immediate efficiency that which she thinks will benefit her survival most effectively. Which was this: an outright lie, or a manipulative truth?

She doesn’t know. Maybe she never will. Behind her, Imogen inhales a deep breath that shakes on the exhale. Laudna’s heart clenches in her chest. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Laudna loves Imogen regardless of the magnitude in which it’s returned.

Would Delilah call that pathetic, or would her devotion impress her?

Following the clench of her teeth comes a contortion of her brow as they scrunch together in wrung-out, bone-deep exhaustion.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. What does matter, Laudna realizes, is that it’s unfair.

Not to her, but to Imogen—who she is beginning to realize has not been given the chance to prove Delilah wrong.

She knows Imogen’s breath, the stutter of it if she’s having a nightmare, the tense of her neck if a migraine is about to set in, the clench of her jaw when the voices become too overstimulating, the way her breath shakes on the exhale when she is trying to hold back tears—because Imogen has allowed her to see it. Because brave, beautiful Imogen sits with her ribs and heart bleeding from her chest every day for Laudna to pick apart as she chooses.

And Laudna, in return, has only ever shown her the aftermath. The scars, the stitching, the mended threads. I’ve seen all of you, Laudna.

A trembling, damning thought: that she has not.

When she wakes in the morning to lightning threaded fingers interwoven tightly between her own, she isn't sure whether it's an admission of defeat or declaration of stubborn, bleeding intent.

And if it is the latter, she worries whether Imogen has realized it—that the thought of her love being something that bleeds makes her teeth ache.

—-

There’s no time. There’s never time.

They leave that morning, set across the tundra of Eiselcross in search of FCG’s home city. What happens next is a bleary blur of passing hours and tense traversal and thoughts of how to fix the things she’s broken so rapidfire in her brain that it almost gets her killed as her brain trips and her foot follows and then, finally, with the creaking branches of her mind snapping entirely.

The time Delilah spends at the wheel exists in the same way the world still exists when you close your eyes—lapped in darkness, lacking any form but the print of an impression—nothing concrete but for the simple knowledge of fact that the world did, still, exist. That it would be there when she could wrest control of her own eyes again.

When she did—and this is arguable, whether or not “she” did and not her capable, beautiful family—the world was indeed still there. She opens her eyes to Imogen’s desperate, tear-stricken face, her chapped lips shivering, her lavender eyes swimming and searching. Laudna’s first thought is that she should have brought another coat.

”That can’t happen again,” Imogen whispers tremulously. Her hands are traveling all over, unable to sit still on Laudna’s bleeding body, drenching them in ichor and blood. Some of the bleeding, Laudna knows, was done by Imogen’s hands. I love you, she had said, I’m trusting you. “Laudna. Laudna. That can’t happen again.”

So, Laudna had thought with no small amount of misery, it wouldn’t. 

She had just about made up her mind on a number of things ranging from leaving altogether to suggesting they just keep her in the hole until they need her—it isn’t like she’d be able to break the barrier anyway, what with her atrophied muscle—to begging, pleading to not be left behind, to at least escort her out of this wretched place before—when Ashton brings forth the pinion.

The Pinion of Service, it’s called. There’s something in the back of her head that laughs at that.

The time it takes to get to Essek’s home and formulate a plan passes, again, in an unrecognizable blur of smeared color and voices. She can only stare at this thing that is meant to liberate her, this purple stone Essek is now saying will need to be placed physically within her. That it’s not a guarantee. That Delilah could still take her.

They’re given a handful of hours after that.

For the most part they race around, immediately set out to find ways to make themselves useful for the coming battle. She’s not sure what they’re doing, really. She is still staring at that rock.

What are you doing?

”Laudna?”

You lied.

I’ll fix it—We’ll fix it.

A hand lands on her cheek, suddenly and softly. A gentle strike of lightning. Imogen. “—are you alright? Laudna?”

Her response comes instinctively, bursting from her mouth well before passing through her brain, “Oh, yes. Perfectly fine. Are you alright?”

Imogen’s hand doesn’t leave her cheek. Laudna can see the minute twitches of muscle in her face that mean she is making a valiant and active attempt at appearing neutral. Were she anyone else, she’d be doing a marvelous job. “You aren’t…” She starts, losing the words and picking them up again, “…aren’t nervous?”

Her response comes, again, instinctively and without permit from her mind, “Oh, yes. I’m terrified.”

Imogen makes a noise at this that, like Laudna’s runaway mouth, seems unintentional. It sounds like it should be a wail; like Imogen reached down into some hurting part of herself and smothered it a moment too late. In so doing, she briefly loses the control over her passive expression and Laudna watches her eyes blink rapidly to fight a sudden onset of tears.

In spite of her loose mouth, it would be wrong to say Laudna lifting her hand to cup Imogen’s cheek was a thoughtless action. It would be more accurate to say that loving and comforting Imogen is her natural state of being. It is thoughtless only in that it is instinctive; it is what she is meant to do. It does not shock her to find her hand where it belongs, more at home on Imogen’s skin than attached to her own body, in the way that sometimes her own words take her by surprise.

What does shock her is her next thought, that Imogen might not want Laudna to touch her like this.

It is the first time she’s touched Imogen like this in too long. Others may call this a dramatic thought—a mere 24 hours—but those poor people don’t know Imogen and they certainly don’t know Imogen like Laudna. There’s a part of her that thinks you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows or loves anyone like Laudna loves her.

Her palm feels simultaneously numb and over-sensitive with the joy of it. If Imogen doesn’t want her to touch her like this anymore she thinks she’ll die. Or have to cut off her hands to spare them the ache.

”I’m sorry.” She whispers. Her thumb runs over the curve of Imogen’s cheek. “Was that the wrong thing to say?” 

Imogen shakes her head. “There is no wrong thing to say. Not about that. Not about this.”

Laudna doubts that. “I was thinking about the gnarlrock.”

Imogen blinks hard enough that for a moment it brings her entire face together in a swirl of disbelief. “Oh? I—yeah, It’s—We’ve gotta stop fucking with purple rocks, huh?”

She smiles. “Yes, well, hopefully this one will work in our favor.”

Imogen laughs lightly, tremulously; she laughs as if the consequence of not laughing is sobbing. It is one of the few Imogen-sounds that Laudna swears to become less familiar with. “Yeah. Yeah, hopefully.” 

She pauses. Laudna watches her search for words, sees one escape her mouth and her tongue follow in a stripe across her lips, sees another catch in the twitching not-quite-furrow of her brow, sees more pool in her arms as they come to the familiar cross over her chest and stomach. If the rest of Laudna’s life was just this—watching Imogen think, watching her put together puzzles in her brilliant mind—she could be content. Whether the rest of her life encompassed the next hour or not.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      And then, a new shock, Imogen doesn’t find the words at all. Or finds them and discards them. As Laudna watches her drop the search and settle into silence, she realizes she is not the only one that feels as if she is treading water in an open sea. Imogen must also feel it, that threat of any word being the one to pull them under.

That can’t happen again.

”I’m sorry. For that night.”

Imogen’s voice is a rough whisper when it leaves her throat, “The—the night with the gnarlrock?” 

“Yes.”

”I thought we already apologized for that night.”

She shrugs. ”Still, then. I’m still sorry.”

”Laudna,” Imogen releases her name in a sigh, “Don’t.”

Laudna’s mouth shuts with a loud click. She’s sorry for that, too.

Silence settles over them again, heavy in a way it has only been once before. Laudna hates it. Hates the oppressive, suffocating feeling of it and the knowledge that its weight is one she wrest upon them both. Hates that she may only have an hour left to live and she’s spending it with this woman she loves with more ferocity than there are words to convey in this stilted silence. 

It hits her, then. Her lack of time. She turns her face to Imogen, who is staring ahead and working her jaw. Has it hit her, too? It wasn’t so long ago that she was asking Imogen to do this, to be the one to put her down if what came to pass came to pass. It wasn’t so long ago that Imogen crossed continents and planes of existence just to give her the chance to choose to leave her.

”Could I show you something?” Laudna asks. Imogen tilts her head. Her eyes are a weighed-down noose. Laudna whispers, “I don’t know how to say it.”

Imogen straightens her back enough that when she responds she is looking down at her, if only slightly. “Of course, Laudna. Do you mean—“ and she taps her temple with two scarred fingers.

”No, no. I actually—“ and now she straightens, her spine unfurling like rolled parchment, to reach into her bag. When she finds what she’s feeling for, she pulls it out slowly.

At first, Imogen is confused. For a brief moment Imogen is really confused. And then the past few weeks seem to rush back into her mind and she recognizes it—Ashton’s bullshit magical pipe.

”They gave it to me when—that night. To use.”

”Your…proudest moment, yeah?”

Laudna shrugs, “Or ‘kindest’. Up in the air on what they meant, but that's not new for them.”

”No, they love that shit.”

”We should really speak to them about being more clear. Succinct.”

”Concise.”

”Exactly.”

”If we did he’d just get more obnoxiously vague on purpose.”

“That’s true.” Laudna smiles. There is a smaller, matching smile on Imogen’s face. 

“What—“ Imogen starts, “What is it that you want to show me, with this? That you can’t say?”

Laudna toys with the pipe in her hands, twisting and running the pads of her fingers over the runic inscriptions. “I just…” she starts, her voice a barely there whisper, “I want you to know all of me. Selfishly, I do.”

Imogen looks as if she’s about to argue. Laudna stops her by raising the pipe between them both. “This is it. The last piece of me.”

”I don’t think that’s true at all.” Imogen responds shakily. “I think—I think there’s things about you even you haven’t figured out yet, Laudna.”

Laudna smiles at her. What a beautiful thought. What a beautiful mind. She aches with the urge to take her hand. To feel her split-open fingers toy with the ring on her finger. Has she noticed, yet? The shift in placement. The promise she refuses to utter aloud, lest her tendency to break them rear its head. If she has, she has yet to allude to it.

”Maybe.” She responds wistfully. “Still. I would like to show you. I would…” she trails off, fighting back a sudden rise of emotion in her chest. She swallows. “I would like for someone to…to know. In case. You know.”

”I know.” Imogen cries—because she is crying now. Silent, soft rain on her cheeks, the closest thing to an admission of terror and love she’s made all day. And then, miracle of miracles, Imogen takes her free hand into her own and holds tight. “I know.”

She tightens her grip on Imogen’s hand to what she’s sure would be a painful degree for anyone with less atrophied muscle than herself, but is likely just a mild squeeze as is. “Thank you.” She whispers.

Imogen lifts their hands to her tear-stained lips and presses a kiss to their combined joints. She says nothing.

Laudna brings the pipe up and into the light. With a flick, the runes begin to glow. “Well,” she grins, “bottom’s up.”

Imogen laughs against her hand. “Yeah. Bottom’s up.”

She takes the smallest of moments to close her eyes and memorize the feeling of Imogen’s lips on her skin, her laugh in the air. And then, holding tight to those images in her mind, she inhales.

Inhales.

Holds.

Exhales.

The smoke leaves her mouth with a quiet hiss. It gathers in front of her nose and dances in front of her face in many monochromatic swirls. Beside her, Imogen holds her breath.

As the last waves of smoke leave her lips, it gathers in a tight, twisting ball in front of her and then expands—gently, softly—into the vague approximation of shapes and then people and—

The image in front of them is a familiar one. Matilda—who still looks like Laudna, if Laudna were made of a bit more meat and a bit less bone—sits at a dinner table. It’s a smaller one than the dinner table, and though the smoke does not capture the detail Laudna knows which of the four seats surrounding it are missing a leg or chipped to the point of scratching. She knows which of the seats the apparition of her meat-body will choose, just as she knows the vague silhouette of a person entering the scene is her mother, whose hands had been dirtied and frame had been thin and who moved, at that point, with very little of the grace Matilda remembered her harboring when she was younger.

Her mother sits across from her and leans in, exhaustion pulling her bones into the wood and her skin towards the roots. Matilda is talking, hands shooting around expressively like a gnat, as another silhouette—stockier, his torso almost a solid block of smoke—sits next to her mother. She remembers that her father had leaned forward onto his elbows, wringing his hands on the table. Matilda takes a deep breath that shifts her spine of smoke into an almost straight line and then reaches towards something on the table.

She lifts the smoke from the smoke. In her hands is something small and rectangular.

Next to her, Imogen whispers: ”Oh.”

Matilda takes the letter into her hands and without much grace rips it open at the seam. Laudna notices that Matilda’s parents seem to flinch at the action. A few moments pass of her reading, processing, and then Matilda shoots upright. She’s pointing at the letter with one hand and though the smoke, again, does not capture the detail—Laudna knows there is a smile on her face.

”A dinner,” Laudna narrates quietly, as the smog continues to play out the scene in silence before them, “They must have seen something, Mama. They must have seen something in me. I was chosen.”

The smoke stills mid-scene—and then loses its weight entirely, dissipating in the air. That’s fine. Laudna doesn’t really remember the rest with nearly as much clarity.

Imogen is silent next to her. It feels like she is the farthest from her she has ever been and the closest she has been in days. Eventually, she whispers, “Laudna…”

“Even now,” Laudna starts, “Even now—my proudest or kindest or most heroic moment—whatever the fuck Ashton said this thing does—it’s this. Even knowing…do you see?”

Imogen doesn’t move. Laudna doesn’t lift her gaze, not strong enough to witness what damning expression is on her face. “See what?”

”Me.” Laudna chokes, “That’s the end of my life in my hands. Of my parents’ lives. The life of a little girl and her family. Of some fucking—innocent fucking bear, I think, and i’m still—Imogen. It meant I could become something. Something more than some…” she pauses to gather enough venom in her mouth to properly spit the next words, “…some hedge witch.”

Delilah is still temporarily sedated somewhere within her, but Laudna swears she hears the reverberating echo of her depraved chuckle along the rotting walls of her mind at the words. At the reminder of them.

But it’s the truth. She feels the sting of it in her chest still, sinking like teeth into the viscera of her. Maybe Matilda would have chosen better had she known; but, Laudna knows she wouldn’t. If told, here and now, to make that choice again—then damn them. Damn her parents and that innocent family and that bear and herself. Damn everyone who would keep her from this.

Imogen’s hand grips tightly to her shoulder, almost shaking her. “You don’t mean that.” She whispers, “Laudna. Honey, you don’t mean that.”

Laudna lifts her swimming gaze to meet Imogen’s. She grasps at her wrist. Damn everyone who would keep her from this. “Yes, I do.”

Imogen seems unable to process the words, blinking rapidly at her with her mouth hanging slightly open. As if Laudna hasn’t spent every day for over two years reiterating her devotion, her reverence. It doesn’t surprise her. She has tried to keep this part of her love, this part that is taloned, hidden away with purpose. 

It isn’t that Laudna thinks Imogen loves her any less devotedly, any less reverentially; Laudna may not understand it, but she knows that if Imogen were a more selfish person her own love would be just as barbed. Sharply filed. That’s the real issue. When you break it down to its simplest, core problem it isn't that Imogen loves less wholly; it's that Imogen is a better person than Laudna is.

Delilah lies. Except for when she doesn’t. She is not condemned to anything that she did not choose to condemn herself to.

When the day comes and Imogen is asked that inevitable question—your life or the world’s—no matter how much she rages and wails against even the concept of it, she knows in her bones what Imogen will pick.

Laudna may have been making decisions of her own lately with the intention of the “greater good” somewhere tangentially in her mind, but more than that it was this same indelible, innate desire. She consumes Bor’dor’s soul and even through the thick grief of it she feels relief. She consumes what remains of the Willmaster’s on Ruidus and is filled, however briefly, with that same childlike excitement of picking up a letter that will change her life. She consumes Otohan’s killing dagger and her heart beats for what feels like the first time.

Finally, she admits: “I don’t want to lose it all.”

Imogen’s face trips into something akin to despair. Laudna takes her hand. “But, more than that—more than anything—I don’t want to lose you.”

Her final admission: that her love for the world exists only as a refraction of her love for Imogen.

Imogen’s breath leaves her in a stutter. She blinks rapidly. Her eyes are wet, but not yet or no longer leaking. Laudna takes her in unflinchingly, allowing herself what may be a final moment of selfish, feverish desire. It should feel weighted. Instead, Laudna feels as if she could fly, so light is the weight in her chest.

It is then that she notices the lack of a catching gleam on Imogen’s brow and feels the press of cold metal somewhere against the skin of her thigh, where one of Imogen’s hands is pressed to uphold her weight. Laudna feels a small, besotted smile find her lips, trembling at the corners. She reaches out, catches and then tucks away some of Imogen’s soft lavender curls. Imogen startles at the touch.

Laudna breathes hard through her nose as their eyes meet again. Some ugly and sticky sort of soft chuckle. “You’re going to give yourself a headache, love.”

“I—You—“ Imogen tumbles over the words, wrestles them in her mouth. Laudna recognizes the look on her face the way one recognizes the clouds before a storm. What Laudna cannot decide on is if that means she should seek shelter, or if it is something they can weather.

Imogen must hear her train of thought—which, of course she can—because suddenly her focus solidifies into something incontestable. Her brow is still furrowed, her eyes still wide and wet and wonderful. Laudna is almost excited to hear her final verdict, if only as an excuse to witness that fire again.

But then, Imogen says: “My turn.”

”What—“

Whatever would have come out of her mouth is lost to the sudden flurry of Imogen across her lap, snatching the pipe from limp hands and inhaling deeply all before Laudna regains enough awareness to even comprehend the movements.

Imogen, of course, is thrown immediately into a fit of coughing.

”Oh, Imogen—it wasn’t—I would’ve just handed it to you. I wouldn’t have fought you over it.”

Imogen coughs hard into her elbow, smoke still leaving her lungs and tears in her eyes. She waves her hands in an effort to convey what Laudna assumes amounts to shut up. 

Laudna finds herself suddenly filled with a desperate sadness for all those months Imogen spent pining in silence, because more than anything in this moment Laudna wants to kiss her. Aches with the desire to kiss her. She cannot imagine the agony of this moment stretched out over the course of months. Then again, Laudna highly doubts she'd be half as endearing choking on smoke.

She does her the courtesy of focusing instead on the rising stone-grey cloud spilling from her mouth as it coagulates into an image she recognizes at once.

The smoke presents it in monochrome, but Laudna knows that field and that hill and the exact hue of pink-purple flowers that litter it like stars. She recognizes that dilapidated cabin, that crowd of slobbering people. She recognizes Imogen. She recognizes, barely, herself.

There is no sound but she knows, as clearly as she can remember the echo of Matilda’s voice, the echo of Imogen’s as her silhouette turns to Laudna’s. We’re gonna have to hold off on the courtesies until later.

She knows every moment of what comes next in perfect detail. Imogen, powerful from the first moment, turning that potential onto the crowd. Imogen taking her hand, leading them both fearlessly into some unknown. She remembers the way Imogen’s hands felt in hers that first time, still radiating static. She remembers the warmth of her voice. I just want you here, next to me.

She watches it all unfold again in front of her, utterly taken. At some point Imogen stops coughing next to her and falls silent as well. Smoke-Imogen reacts to Smoke-Laudna’s response in a way that Real-Laudna can still feel the warmth of, as Smoke-Laudna confirms this new and beautiful partnership. And with what Laudna knows are matching, final, incandescent smiles, the smoke fades.

She watches it dissipate for a moment, overcome with a desire to contain it, somehow. To take the smoke back within herself if only to hold onto the tangible memory of it a touch longer. Instead, she turns to Real-Imogen, who is already looking at her.

Her eyes are determined, if still drowning. She twists to grasp at the junction of Laudna where her throat meets her shoulder. “You see?” She whispers. “Doesn’t matter what you do. Doesn’t matter what choices you make. I’m never gonna regret you, Laudna. I’m never gonna think being with you was a mistake.”

Laudna feels pressure behind her eyes building rapidly, but Imogen continues, “I want you to see it so bad, Laudna. The way I love you—it’s—you saved my life that day, as much or more than I saved yours. You can’t—You aren’t going to convince me you’re a bad person, Laudna. You’re not.”

Imogen takes Laudna’s face in the palms of her hands, split-open fingers cradling her jaw. She pauses long enough to lick her dry lips. “You were chosen.”

Laudna nods, thick tears like a river of tar leaving her cheeks sticky. ”I was chosen.” 

”You were. She did choose you.” She concedes. Her voice trembles. “But so did I. Laudna. I did, too.”

And, really, how is anyone meant to respond to that aside from how Laudna then does: by breaking.

She collapses forward, throws the barely there weight of her body into Imogen’s arms, curls her own too-long ones tightly around Imogen's waist and back. She whispers in a hoarse, tear-choked voice, “You’re my best friend.”

Imogen, equally choked up, returns the tight grip tenfold. Laudna feels the heat of her shivering breath when she responds, “You’re my best friend, too.”

Laudna gasps against her skin, “If I don’t make it—If she wins—just—thank you. My very first best friend. My very first.”

Imogen coughs into her neck, squeezes her tighter. “Don’t forget Pâté.”

Or Bella, Laudna thinks, chuckling wetly into Imogen’s hair. “Fine.” She presses a damp, too-deep kiss to Imogen’s hairline. She says against her skull, canines grazing against her skin with every syllable, “Thank you, love. My love.”

She feels Imogen’s fingers grip like claws into the skin of her biceps and a buckling, crippling sob bury itself into her shoulder. And then Imogen pulls back, releases the hold on her arms to once again cradle her face and simply holds her there, runs her gaze over all of Laudna’s blemishes and bloodstains and ichor. She lets her fingers graze across the blades of her cheekbones, the dip of her brow, the bend of her nose, the shadow of her lips. 

Laudna does not think nor hope for a kiss. If only because she does not need it to demonstrate herself anymore. If only because Imogen loves her and that is enough.

Eventually, Imogen nods. “Thank you.” She whispers. There are still tears cutting down her cheeks. Her brows set with determination. “Let’s go set you free.”

—

When Delilah Briarwood is seventy-three—or, perhaps, forty-four and thirty-three—she watches the face of the girl she once invited to dinner fill with something like animal satisfaction as she locks her away in the hollow of her chest, right next to her still slow-beating heart.

Behind that girl’s frail ribcage, beneath her extensive collar, in front of her shifting scapula–it appears to Delilah through the filter of a purple veil of arcane glass as if she is surrounded by many undulating teeth.

—

The first thing she asks for in the aftermath–or, perhaps, the aftermath of the aftermath–is a bath.

And the bath looks lovely, really. The decor it seems Essek and his partner keep isn’t anything as ostentatious as what they had access to in Whitestone, but it’s big enough for two and the water hot enough to burn. And Imogen is there. Imogen is pouring some kind of lovely oil into the tub that smells truly divine and swirling her fingers into the mix, spreading it throughout. It rises along with the steam into the room and fills the air with the scent of something soft and floral and lovely. The light from Imogen’s scars reflects off of the undulating surface like many refracted, tiny pink-purple auroras. It’s lovely. Imogen is lovely.

Imogen is looking at her. Has been for more than a few seconds, by the concern settling into the softness of her face. Oh. Well. It isn’t like Delilah was the cause for her wandering mind. Or the ichor. If the subtle gray smear of it on Imogen’s chin is anything to go by. 

“Laudna?”

Oh! There she goes again, wandering. Always wandering, even in stillness. She should really—“Yes?”

Imogen’s brows join together over the bridge of her nose. “Do you—Are you—“

She juggles the words in her mouth for a moment, bites her lip, and then seems to give up with a sharp, sardonic exhalation of air that could be considered some type of laugh. Her head drops, hanging limp from her shoulders for a long moment before she picks it back up and levels her with a stare that is equally as soft and tender and affectionate as it is determined. Determined? Determined for what?

She lifts her hand from the porcelain edge of the tub, “C’mere, Laudna.”

Laudna does. No amount of her mind’s wandering would lead her to anywhere but Imogen’s hands, anyway.

As their hands find each other and lace together, Imogen stands from the edge in full to meet her. She brings her other hand up to Laudna’s face, uses two fingers to brush oily strands of hair back behind her ear and then, without ever disconnecting, runs them lightly over her jaw to cup her cheek in the warmth of her palm. It’s nice. Still nice. She’s glad she still runs cold. 

She’s not sure she’d trade dealing with Delilah in perpetuity for something that would diminish how Imogen makes her feel. 

Imogen smiles up at her, as if in response to the thought. Which, well, is possible. “Can I join you? I—I mean, I was assuming, but I’d like to ask—“

”Please.” She responds immediately. She hasn’t been alone since the ritual, hasn’t had a moment to really think about—and no one’s really asked, yet—about what it means—“Imogen. Yes. Please.”

Imogen’s smile stretches to display her teeth, then. She loves it. Imogen’s smile and Imogen’s teeth. She hates that so few people love Imogen’s bite. She loves that Imogen is unafraid to have fangs with her. “Alright. Alright. Here, lemme—“ She reaches down to take Laudna’s other hand as well, pulling her along gently, “Tell me if it’s scalding enough for you.” She teases. Laudna smiles. She smiles because even if it wasn’t scalding it would be enough.

Not that that matters, as she steps into the water and to her admitted delight it settles on her skin like wet flame. It draws a sigh from her lungs that is purely pleasure. She hears Imogen swallow behind her, the supporting grip on her hands tightening ever so slightly. Laudna laughs, then. “And I thought I was being insatiable.”

Imogen coughs. “Can you blame me? From nothing to you? I’m making up for a twenty-eight year dry spell over here.”

”From nothing to me,” Laudna repeats, the words leaving her in the light bounce of a laugh, “I suppose the bar was low.”

”Laudna.”

”Hm?”

Imogen rolls her eyes. It is deeply fond. Laudna can’t roll her eyes or they’ll get stuck there. She says, “You know that’s not what I meant. ‘Sides,” and here her eyes darken, “I’d argue the bar was very high. Maybe I was saving myself for someone.”

Laudna grins, lowers herself fully into the water with a deep sigh, and reaches a hand up to cup Imogen’s chin, “Oh, yes, you truly are the pinnacle of purity, darling.” She runs her thumb over the fat of Imogen’s bottom lip. Her finger comes away with a soft stain of gray. She watches Imogen’s stomach clench, sees her physically restrain herself from chasing Laudna’s thumb with her teeth and tongue. “Though, I can’t help but feel as though if I had abs we could’ve been doing this a long time ago.”

Imogen gasps through a smile, blushing and vaguely scandalized, “Laudna!”

Laudna laughs fully, reaching to take Imogen’s hand again in her own and bringing it up to her lips to press two quick, soft kisses to the skin. “I’m teasing, darling.” That’s what people do, right? With their partners. Surely Delilah—or maybe Sylas—well. She should really stop trying to be suave. She presses a third, even lighter kiss to Imogen’s knuckles and then her voice asks, even more lightly, “Get in?”

A sound not dissimilar to a whine leaves Imogen’s chest; though, to Laudna’s ears it sounds—well, firstly, beautiful—but, secondly more like something vaguely distraught than aroused. Maybe she shouldn’t find it beautiful then. If it’s distraught. There shouldn’t be anything beautiful about Imogen in distress.

Imogen stands. One of her hands runs up and over Laudna’s shoulder and then settles against the nape of her neck, where she presses lightly for Laudna to lean forward. Laudna does, feels Imogen step in behind her, and then feels strong thighs bracket either side of her body, settling into her sides. God, she really needs to get Imogen a horse. For her thighs.

She settles fully, Imogen’s stomach pressing up flush against Laudna’s naked back, her arms circling around her waist and knotting at her stomach to press them even closer. She noses at the skin behind Laudna’s ear. Laudna sighs again and whispers, “Hi.”

”Hi,” Imogen whispers back, “I love you.”

The infinite amount of hopes she could hang on that sentence. The things she could build from its bones. She could bundle it up and give it strings and a name and a form and gift it back to her. She presses back, tries in vain to fuse their skin where it meets. Turns her head to brush their noses, and their lips together, “I love you, too. More than anything.”

Imogen kisses her. It feels like it lights her up from within. Which reminds her—and she pulls back—“Could you—I’m sorry, but—“

”Anything.” Imogen interrupts urgently, pressing her lips then to the corner of her mouth. “Anything.”

Laudna hums. Her chest flickers. “I—hm—I feel. Um. Unclean, still. I think. And I don’t—“ her hands, squeezing down on her throat—her hands, running from sternum to stomach and flaying herself open—“I don’t think my hands can—will work. They’ll smear. Does that make sense? I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize.” Imogen says, and then holds her breath for a long moment. Laudna feels her eyes sweep over the whole of her, analyzing. She can always tell when someone is analyzing her, when their gaze is picking apart her muddy pieces and deciding where the worst parts or the easiest-to-cripple parts of her lie. She wonders, What do you think are the worst parts of me? Where would you shoot to kill?

And then thinks: Do you know that if you told me that I would break it within myself, that worst part? If you told me where you’d shoot I would paint you a target. Bullseye. I would never have you miss.

And then, more simply: Love me still. Please. Whatever you find. Tell me which parts of me to keep and I will tend to them. Tell me which parts to lose and they will burn. Please. I promise you can make something lovely out of broken parts.

It’s strange. In the aftermath—the immediate aftermath—Laudna was shocked to find herself filled to the brim with what she could only figure to be abundant, valiant joy. There is a contentedness now glowing purple in her chest that she did not expect and that is only now beginning to wane. There is the feeling of freedom, finally, freedom so light in her bones she could float away with it, but still there is that dreadful thought: that she stains.

She fears that if she looks for herself, if she wipes the grime and the sweat and blood and ichor away from not her body but her mind, she won’t be able to parse what dark parts were Delilah and what is just herself, as she has always been.

Finally or suddenly, Imogen presses another kiss to the portion of skin where her shoulder melts into her throat. She says, softly, “Of course. But, first—“ and shifts, hands landing on Laudna’s hips and pushing her softly, sliding her away so as to turn and ask, “Can you do me, really quick?”

Laudna takes a moment to remember what she was even responding to; but, Imogen smiles, her cheeks and throat still gray and, oh, there’s some in little shapes across her chest, too, and she had forgotten she did that—did she do that? Or did Imogen. She can’t remember.

Imogen says, more softly, “You’re not gonna stain. Promise.”

She blinks, recognizes for the second time the blank amount of space above Imogen’s brow where once a shield sat. Right.  ”Oh. Yes, of course.”

So she does. She turns to face Imogen, their legs an awkward tangle between them. She grabs the soft rag Imogen had lain on the edge of the tub and the bar of subtly scented soap besides—Imogen stops her.

“Just these.” Imogen says, pressing her thumb insistently into the center of Laudna’s damp palm. “You can—the soap is—yes, please, I am gross, but—just these. If that's okay?” 

”Of course. Of course, darling.”

So just the soap, then. She squeezes it in her hands, spreading bubbles and oil along her fingers, dips it all into the water and then repeats the process once more.

She dips one hand—the one not in charge of the soap—into the water, capturing as much in the cup of her palm as she can. She runs the very tip of her fingernail over Imogen’s navel and between the valley of her breasts and sternum as she brings it up from the surface, all the way up to her collar where she loosens her hold in a slow glide. She watches it run from one end of Imogen’s collar to the other, down her carved open chest in a quick and then catching glaze.

She thinks her own chest flickers again like candlelight in a breeze. She runs her hand more firmly over the upper-most curves of Imogen's split-open skin. “You're so beautiful.”

Imogen hums. She whispers, “So are you.”

Laudna shakes her head. Not in disagreement but in disbelief. Not of Imogen's words but of her. The vision of her. Imogen opens her mouth—likely in misplaced protestation—and as much as Laudna adores the cleansing sound of her voice it isn’t what she needs, right now. What she needs is—there—her mouth on Imogen’s wet collar, the feeling of Imogen’s jaw tensing against her hairline.

“Baby,” Imogen gasps, and then laughs, “And you were teasing me.”

“Am teasing you, arguably.” Laudna mutters against her skin, which, fuck, she just said she should stop that. The teasing. But Imogen’s breath does a funny hiccuping thing that Laudna has very quickly learned in the past two weeks means that she is doing something well. Or right. Right or well. They aren't always the same thing with her.

She leans up to press her lips to the cut of Imogen's jaw. She says, “Sorry.”

Imogen leans down; She kisses her. She says against her lips, “Don't be.” 

She tastes—it reminds her—”Oh,” she says aloud, and brings her other hand—the soapy one—up to Imogen's face as well. She runs her soapy thumb firmly along Imogen’s chin, watches the white suds go charcoal-smear gray. Her tongue suddenly feels trapped behind her teeth, like it's swollen, like it's a worm trying to break the seal of her lips for nutrients or sunlight.

She bites down on the wriggling traitor in her mouth, incisors cutting into the flesh with the sharp tang of whatever sludge runs through her veins. Later. Later. She flexes her hands the slightest bit against where they lay at Imogen’s jaw. Just these, she had asked. Just these.

She brings the very bottom of either of her palms to greet each other just below the curve of Imogen’s chin with such reverence that it is almost not touching her entirely. Which is counter. So she presses the slightest bit more, where it is more than shared water that connects them but skin-to-skin directly, and runs her soap-laden thumbs in dragging soft circles over, first, the fat of Imogen’s freckled cheeks.

Imogen’s head lulls into the cradle of her hands, eyes fluttering closed, a bird landing in the damp safety of her creaking, rotting limbs. Their noses brush; Laudna angles her head just so that she can press her lips to the skin there, as her fingers circle and circle and circle and lower, finding themselves behind her ears, now, angling her head up just so that she can press her lips to Imogen’s with no pressure behind it at all. And then lower—the dip of her chin—Laudna curls her thumbs under the sharp cut of Imogen’s jaw so that her nails scrape with a barely there presence against Imogen’s sensitive skin; it still manages to bring forth a trembling sigh from Imogen’s mouth and onto the bridge of Laudna’s trailing nose as she presses her lips more firmly against the subtle shadow below the protrusion of her bottom lip.

She leans back. Her hands drift without disconnecting, twisting, following lavender strikes of lightning and freckled constellations to where her mouth had been. The index and middle fingers of both hands press into the skin there, wiping away the still subtle smear of ichor, stretching up to run lightly over Imogen’s lips. Imogen’s eyes are still blissfully closed, head limp in Laudna’s gentle grasp. Her mouth opens against the barely there press of her fingers and her stomach does that desperate rolling thing it did earlier and this time she does not stop herself—nor open her eyes—as she tilts her chin up so that her tongue meets the lines of Laudna’s index and then further to close her mouth entirely around them and groans—

Laudna comes back to herself, eyes blinking open as if from a dream and face—somehow—buried in the storm-marked expanse of Imogen’s collar. She hooks her fingers into and under Imogen’s mandible, fingers pressing into the wriggling, traitorous worm in Imogen’s mouth as she turns her head to the side and rises back up. Imogen exhales hard through her nose. Laudna kisses her open mouth.

“Not that you aren’t unbelievably sexy,” She whispers, “like, sincerely, holy shit—but, doesn’t that taste like soap?”

Imogen blinks slowly, eyelids heavy as she processes what Laudna said and then chuckles around the joints of her fingers. When the words finally do land, Laudna watches her face scrunch together and a vague sound of displeasure vibrate from her chest. She gently grabs Laudna’s wrist and pulls it from her lips, eyes sparkling. She responds, face still a little lop-sided in its distaste, “Yeah, actually, now that you mention it. Yuck.”

“Yuck, she says.”

Imogen grins. “Incredibly rude of me.”

“Immeasurably so.”

“When you were so considerate with your hands.”

“I do try.”

“A punishable offense, one might say.”

Laudna raises a sharp, simultaneously authoritative and teasing brow. “Is that a request?”

Roses bloom in Imogen’s cheeks, unrelated to the heat of their bath. “Thinly veiled.”

They’re both grinning, their eyes taking in the other in a joyful ouroboros. Imogen’s hands lift from below the water to frame Laudna’s still-flushed face. She softens. “You know,” she whispers, “I was trying to do something super sweet and romantic and heartfelt just there and you went and made it raunchy.”

Laudna grins wider, tilts her head to press her lips to Imogen’s dripping palm. “Would it help to know that even the raunchy bits are also super sweet and romantic and heartfelt with you?”

Laudna chases a river of condensation down Imogen’s wrist with her lips, and Imogen scrunches her eyes and nose in that immeasurably attractive way in response. She giggles, ”Alright, casanova, scooch up.”

Laudna, somewhat reluctantly, does. “What’s a casanova?”

Imogen shrugs, “A bard, I think, or something.”

“You think I’ve the energy of a bard.” Laudna mock-gasps.

Imogen laughs, “I think you’ve the energy of a romantic.”

“Oh. So he’s a romantic bard. That’s the most annoying kind, Imogen.”

“Jeez,” Imogen sighs, lathering her voice with humor and her hands in soap, “Evidently, I’m not very good at the romantic bit.”

Laudna collapses forward, heavy with the mixed weight of joy she doesn’t know where to place and an emptiness she is unsure how to fill, and presses her lips hard to the dip of Imogen’s collar. “That’s not true in the slightest.”

She stays there with her nose pressed to Imogen’s now freshly scented skin. Imogen’s chest dips in quick beats as she chuckles softly against the crown of Laudna’s head and then presses her lips there. “I’ll take your word for it. C’mere.”

A hound to her call, she does. Imogen gently pushes at her shoulder to spin her around where she once again settles between her thighs. 

Imogen starts with her shoulders. The lightning fissures of her hands softly land on the bony protrusions of her scapula and undulate in waves until they meet in the middle atop the bony protrusions of her spine. Gentle, reverent, revelatory. Part of Laudna wishes for the bite of her nails.

Imogen huffs behind her and then kisses, quickly, the back of her neck, “Maybe when you're feeling a bit more settled, yeah?”

Settled is a very nice way of putting it. Imogen is being very nice about it. About that awful piece of undeniable hollowness in the wake of what should be solely freeing. That hunger that is all her own, simmering now instead of at a rolling boil. She is being so accommodating for such an ugly piece of her.

That awful little romantic bard part of her might say that’s what love is. She’s sure that awful little hound part of herself would nip at its heels until it was doing some awful jig in her mind.

She spares a glance for the layered, broken tissue marring her chest. All these parts of her she wishes to be done with. All these parts of her she can't comprehend loving. All these parts of her Imogen loves, anyway.

Imogen’s arms wrap around her, settling on the purple luminance of her heart. If Laudna squints her eyes just so, the lines on Imogen’s skin match. It makes her seem cut-through with Imogen. Intertwined. Entangled. Imogen takes her fingers and runs them gently down her alight ribs, "We'll need to keep an eye on the stitches, make sure nothing gets infected.” She whispers gently. “It’ll scar, but it'll heal."

The breath in her chest trips, like the air in her lungs was a running thing and the words put a stutter in its step. Behind her, Imogen stills. Laudna, again, feels the trace of her eyes as they follow a thought pass over her face. After a moment, she squeezes her tightly against the naturally warm, vibrant rupture of her own skin. She says again, stronger this time, "Laudna. It’ll leave a scar.” She kisses the cutting edge of Laudna’s trembling jaw and then, more softly, the permanently light ring of bruising around her neck. “But it will heal."

Yes, Laudna thinks. It just might.

There is another part of herself waking up within–neither the hound nor the awful romantic bard nor Matilda nor Delilah–something blinking drowsily awake like a newborn at the world. She isn’t sure what to call it, isn’t sure it has a name yet. It is being cradled in the mess of her mind in hands shattered by red and purple storm, slowly coaxed awake by the gentle rumble of loving thunder and the caress of open air.

She isn't sure what to call it  as it takes in the warm, safe bed of Imogen’s doting palms, but she thinks it has wings.

—

Almost two years after the scattering of the divine, four years after Imogen, twenty-two and fifty-two years after her arrival on the world, Laudna begins to feel something like peace.

She realizes this with her hand buried in Carpaccio Caviar’s thick, sticky fur, as he pants with his tongue hanging loosely from his barely held together jaw, draping over exposed bone and ligament. He looks up at her with one wet black orb of an eye and the other a glowing, magenta gathering of magic in the concave of an exposed socket. Slobber like tar drips from his heaving gums.

She knows now. Caviar is hers. Not a manifestation of Delilah, not a taunting reminiscence of that shrew woman’s view. She feels the difference now between the uncomplicated call and response of her own innate magic and the demand and force of Delilah’s. She thinks the once effortless question of power was one of her many plays, an attempt at obfuscating the truth. Now, in her pettiness, she has exposed herself. Herself and Laudna, both.

From beneath her hand he lets loose a ghastly bark, looking out at one of his favorite playmates.

Ashton, who is visiting for the first time in a few weeks but the nth time in as many months, is half-crouched in what is hip-high grass to her and waist-high grass to him with a half gnawed bone gripped in his hands. He smiles with all his teeth in that unique Greymoore-grin of his that seems more-than-vaguely angry. Behind him, in the far distance, she can just make out The Key Breaker bobbing lightly in the wind, awaiting Ashton’s return and departure.

“C’mon, mutt!” They laugh. “Fucking come and get it!”

Caviar gives a low huff and looks up at her as if saying Can I? Can I? She scratches behind his cropped ears. “Go on, then.” She smiles. “Make a mess of yourself.”

Caviar licks her hand once and then takes off, bounding after a cackling Ashton. She watches them for a few seconds, Ashton taunting him with the bone and juking left and right, before that violently sweet grin of his is back and he yells, “Get this!” and throws the bone directly into one of his swirling multi-colored portals as hard as he can. The bone jettisons from the air sixty feet away and flies even further than that. Caviar wastes no time.

“Good luck, fucker!” Ashton yells after him, stepping backwards lazily in Laudna’s direction. He pivots on his heel to face her.

“God, that thing’s the fucking coolest.”

Laudna scoffs. “That thing has a name.”

“Yeah that rules, too.”

Laudna rolls her eyes. Miraculously, they don’t get stuck. Ashton tilts their head at her, twisting the lopsided cut of their smile. “So.” They start, falling back with their full body into the dirt and grass with a loud thump. Their body breaks the threshold for a moment like one would break the surface of water. “How you doing?”

Laudna crouches down next to him gently, the maroon weave of her dress drifting in the calm breeze. The hand-stitched florals lining her skirt sway along with the grass. She chuckles down at him. “How am I doing?”

He hums in affirmation, angling his head just enough to look up at her. His green eye catches the light of the setting sun like the heath around them, suffusing his perpetually sardonic gaze with syrupy warmth. She reaches a too long, bony finger to poke their nose. Their face twists with the quiet sound of shifting shale. “I’m not the one galavanting around Exandria.” She points out.

He scoffs. When he turns his head to sit up, the sun catches his other eye and dissipates amongst the iris like heavy fog. He leans forward onto his now bent knees, his stone chin hitting the base of his palm with a soft, marble clatter. “Exactly. You’re not.”

Years ago their tone might have set her on the immediate defensive, and here still she feels the rising tide of her anger answer to their every provocation. But she knows them, and she knows now how all of their sharpness is only ever the lightest graze. They do not know how to feel or be felt softly; they are not built for gentleness. Perhaps that has always been their mutual connection. The cut of stone and the cut of bone, indelible despite every attempt to soften the blow. She’s never met another living thing that bleeds the same sluggish color as her.

But though she knows them well her voice still leaves her with the slightest of accusatory undercurrents, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His heavy hands raise up to his fractured ears in surrender. “Just wondering if you’re getting antsy is all.”

“Are you about to ask Imogen and I to go on another little bout with you? Is that what this is leading to?”

“It’s not leading to anything.” He lies.

“Will Imogen not approve? Is that why you’re asking me first?” She gasps suddenly and harshly, hands arising to her cheeks, “Do you think I’d lie to my wife?”

“No, gods, don’t fucking–don’t you dare tell her I was telling you to do that!” He says seriously, as close to real fear as he’s been since his arrival. “She’ll never let me hear the fucking end of it.”

“Then what?” She hisses, impatient. “Stop being so fucking vague all the time.”

Again, he scoffs. “You love me.”

“I would love you more if you practiced speaking with some clarity. You know, I still don’t know what exactly that pipe does? To this day, Ashton!” 

“Fine, fine.” They grunt, angling their head once more towards the setting sun. The light cuts their face into hard planes, emphasizing the minute fissures scattered across their skin. When it hits the gilded edges of their scars, it seems to drip like something molten; for a moment, both of their arms match. “I was being pretty fucking clear, though. For the record.”

“About the pipe?”

“The—oh, I have no fucking idea. I haven’t seen that in weeks. Left it with Milo, I think. Shit, I need to remember to get that back.”

“Ashton. What did you mean?”

He shrugs. “Just that you and Imogen have been here for a bit. An uninterrupted bit.”

“You’re here,” she taunts, “I’d hardly call that uninterrupted.”

“Hah Hah. Look, I’m just saying. It was busy as fuck and now it’s not. One of you sucked in a god eater a few years ago and the other—” they gesture to the hallowed lilac glow of her chest, the shadowed image of her ribs turned cage, “—the other likes to interrupt previously uninterrupted moments. Sometimes.”

She hums. “Am I the other in this equation, or…?”

They shrug again. “Take your pick, I guess.”

There is a snapping sensation in her chest. Caviar has finally caught up with his wayward bone. She sighs. The lilac blossom of her chest flutters and flickers with the motion. “It’s been quiet.” She concedes. “Unusually so. I can’t imagine what Imogen feels, after so much time with so many people in her head to have this—but, it’s quiet even for me. So it must be jarring for her as well.”

“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly had a serene head-space yourself.”

As subtle as he gets. She smiles. “No, I guess I haven’t.”

The aforementioned quiet settles over them now, soft like a shawl. Uninterrupted. He—gently as he can—elbows her gangly elbow with his own. “You’re good?”

Laudna nods. The breeze whispers across her face, picking strands of her hair up in a swirling, sunlit dance. “Yes.” She says, “I think so.”

Ashton smiles. A real smile, lacking all the violence of their usual grin though with just as much cut. They open their mouth to reply—and then get a mouthful of rotting wolf fur. “Fuck!”

“Oh, good boy, Caviar!”

—

That night, after Ashton said their goodbyes with the stubbly ground coffee feeling of their lightest and tightest hug weighing on both she and Imogen’s shoulders, she stays awake to watch Imogen fall asleep.

It is a normal night, brilliantly cool outside and redolent with the smell of freshly baked bread, carved wood, and drying paint. They carry the joy of having their family visit to bed, allow it to make their steps light and exuberant and full with the weight and warmth Laudna knows only love to bring. She dips—with the helpful aid of a thoughtfully cast telekinesis—a giggling Imogen down onto their shared sheets. She crawls over top of her trembling, sacrosanct body and presses her reverently into their mattress and doesn’t let up until Imogen is trembling from something altogether different and then falls bonelessly into slumber.

Imogen—face relaxed as it ever is, alight scars dim along with her resting mind—suspects nothing as she fades into beautiful, earned, dreamful rest.

She runs her fingers over the round curve of Imogen’s cheek, leans in to press her lips to the cut of a lavender strike of lightning splitting her jaw. She closes her eyes, inhales the vanilla and leather and ozone of the other half of her soul, and drifts—

—into the murky, thick dark of her own heart.

There is not silence but a roaring, like the underwater cacophony of the ocean that is both muffled and all encompassing. Like when you’ve yelled too harshly, too much, and your heart pressures your blood until it’s pounding in your ears. That is what it is: not silence but pressure, building.

She stands from her knelt position—how she always arrives here, as if summoned from the ground in a rising swell of ink that takes her shape—and turns to the cage casting a long, vibrant, fragmented purple gleam behind her.

Delilah sits where she always will, shackled to a wall Laudna can’t see. Her body is translucent, shifting like green flame in the shape of a lithe, desecrated woman. She stares, as she always does, directly at Laudna.

Laudna crouches down in front of the glass. She smiles in a way that feels like a gash. “Hello.”

“When I get out of here I will use what remains of your tattered soul to suffocate that woman. I will do it with your hands.”

The smile does not leave Laudna’s face. If anything, the wound grows wider. “All this time and still no nicer.”

“And then I will bring her back and I will do it again and again and again. I will throw you a thousand dinners.”

“Do you feel trapped?” Laudna questions gleefully. She leans forward to press her forehead against the glass. It paints her grey skin lilac.

Delilah grits her teeth. Frayed, loose hair falls sporadically in front of her face. She spits, “Don’t you?”

Laudna ignores her. “I keep dreaming. I’ve never dreamed before. Not like this.”

Delilah ignores her. “I will use your hands to grow new sun trees and I will use your hands to make a spectacle of everyone you love—”

“—Do you have something to do with it?”

Delilah laughs like a harsh bark. “I would never give you dreams. I would fill your mind with images of your father—do you remember him? The glint of his skin? Sylas was so steady with his hands.”

“Good.” Laudna interrupts, “Good. If it isn’t you then it’s me.”

Suddenly Delilah’s forehead is pressed right up against her own, across the glass. Her arms are pulled taught behind her, almost erupting from their sockets. She hisses, “Don’t your teeth ache, Laudna? Laudna, don’t you want to go hunting again?”

“Fuck you.” She spits, and then wakes up.

Her lips are still pressed to Imogen’s jaw, meeting her skin again and again gently like the steady lapping of waves with every rise of the other woman’s breath. Around them is quiet, uninterrupted. She presses another, more intentional kiss to the corner of Imogen’s mouth. She whispers, “Sweet dreams, my love.”

A brief description of Whitestone as it stands today: It is a memorial-city. A sprawling, architectural cenotaph. Every inexplicable ounce of life that exists within its pale walls exists in sheer defiance of fate. At the beating-heart center of this grave-town is a tree. A massive, twisted, starkly alive thing that seems to brush the clouds with the breadth of its reach. 

In 843 PD, this tree rips open at the base in a cleave of light. A group of people and the corpse of a girl step through, and into the sun-spattered light of this living-dead city.

They do not spend more than a day there, do not take the time to explore the veins, roots, tunnels, or alleys. When the corpse of a girl becomes the not-corpse corpse of a girl and is wrapped in the warmth of bodies this city could only ever hope to replicate, they do not venture beyond the grasp of its central roots. They do not find that the city has a secondary heart to its principal, sprawling tree.

The corpse-girl, then, does not find the stone. Does not discover the list of names carved delicately into its surface. Does not run her fingers over the clean, cared for indentations in the written-shape of her fellow corpse-people. Does not see and smell and cry over the fresh flowers lying silently on the monument’s plinth.

She does not get to kneel and gasp and read the name of the girl who, all those years ago, received a letter. She does not see, there, embraced by fresh flower petals and candlelight vigils and the light dusting of snow:

Matilda Bradbury

She does not get to mourn.

—

When Matilda was eight, her mother tried to teach her how to cook.

It was a horrid affair, their oven warming their tiny home to an uncomfortable, weighted heat even in the dense and constant wet-cold of The Parchwood. Her tiny, dirt-stained hands were scrubbed red-raw, eliminating any evidence of the day’s existence from her skin. 

She had moped and stomped and pitched an eight-year-old sized fit in the heavy heated wet-cold of it all. Her mother had taken her hands in her own as she flailed. “Matilda,” she had said, “My love, is helping me cook truly so terrible a fate?”

Matilda hiccupped, “I wasn’t done. Paprika is going to be so mad at me.” 

Her mother tilted her head, hanging like a puppet with its strings cut. “Your doll?”

”She’s a lady and I left her in the barn, Mama! Because I wasn’t done! She’s going to be such a mess. And it's not lady-like. To be so messy.”

Her mother hummed. She brushed tangly, scraggly curls from Matilda’s brow. “Well, I think any lady worth her salt knows how important feeding herself is.”

Matilda had wailed and groaned and thrown her head back. Her hair was dark, but still brown, then, as it followed the force of her spinning, expressive sway. She responded, her lips pursed in a pout, “Nuh-uh. You have to feed me, Mama.”

Her mother had laughed. It was sunny outside. Matilda had frowned even further. Her mother reached out and cupped her little cheeks,  “Okay—Alright, my darling. But soon, yes? And then you can feed me, for once.”

Matilda had grinned and nodded, and that was that. She bounced back-and-forth on her bare feet, on their creaking floorboards. Her mother smiled and tapped her on the nose. “For the record,” she said, “Even the most beautiful, beloved lady is very messy. So, go on then, make a mess of yourself again. Dinner will be ready soon.”

(And, so, Matilda did—)

She rushed back out into the open, persistent fog of the wood, made her way to the barely standing, croaking red barn on the outskirts of the patch of the world she called home, and crawled up and back into the loft where the inanimate audience of her most loved dolls were waiting. Later, as the sun began to truly set and paint the muddy, fog-shrouded mess of air around them into something more closely resembling a forest Matilda could imagine being sewn into the pages of her favorite stories—Matilda pulled her hands from the nest of her creations, palms stained ink-dark. 

(—make a mess of herself, that is).

—

When Matilda was fifteen, the hounds came.

Hounds in the sense that they howled and snarled and hunted like them, but distinctly not hounds in the bone deep, dry gashes that split them apart like a meat pie filled with steam, less of a cutting split than a bloated burst. Not hound-like in the way that the fur of one of its legs seemed a different shade and texture, like an ashen stain against charcoal. Not hound-like in the way their teeth appeared layered and chipped—serrated, almost—like a mouth full of shark skin. Not like a shark’s teeth—those were its claws, hooked at the end and sharp enough to rend the ground beneath them with their every heavy step.

Matilda first runs into them on her way back from school in Whitestone proper, dirt staining the skin of her face and her lovely new dress, tears splitting the seams and tears cleaving a path down her darkened cheeks.

It shambles out onto her path, eyes reflecting like a predator’s, sparkling like they’re too wet. The effect makes it seem like its pair of eyes are instead a cluster of eyes, like a spider’s collection embedded in its sockets. Its claws cut the earth between them, and where it cuts the ground seems to weep with pools or tendrils of shadow. She stops, clutching the hem of her dress in her bony fingers.

From the not-hound-hound’s point of view, she must look the part of easy prey. Tall, slight of frame, young, and completely on her own. It must take it by surprise when the shadows pooling around its shark-tooth paws wrap and bind it, climbing like vines of ichor through its mangy fur, curling around its throat and pulling it to the dirt.

Matilda, ten paces away, lets go of her dress. It drops from her hands soaked black, as if it had been dipped in an inkwell.

Quietly—almost shyly—she begins to cross the distance. Her footsteps do not cut the earth more than they do stain it, every footstep leaving behind a bleed of black that collects in the soil and coagulates like an old wound. The not-hound snarls, tries desperately to force its way out of the bind and by her tenth step—it quiets.

She kneels in front of it, extends a hand out as if to soothe and then seems to physically shake the thought away, pulling her hand back towards her knees and chest. She tilts her head. “Oh, that’s fun,” she says aloud, “That’s not your leg, is it?”

Its front-most left leg—ashen gray—begins suddenly at the bend of its chest and shoulder, separating the limb from the rest of its soot colored body in a sudden cut of color. Again, she starts as if to touch or pet or soothe, and then thinks better of it.

”I should like to know who made you—they’ve got such an eye for detail!” She smiles, her hands coming up to frame her cheeks. “Truly, I’ve not had the thought to mix-and-match bonework before. You’re really something special.” 

The hound studies her. Its eyes are snow-blind. Matilda hums.

”Oh,” she starts, lifting herself back onto the balls of her feet, “I wish you were kind. I’d bring you home if you were. You’d have so many treats and scratches—the good kind of scratches—but, you’re not, are you?”

The hound tilts its head. Its clouded eyes blink slowly up at her. A spear of ink shoots out from beneath her feet and semi-solidifies in her grasp.

”I’ll make it quick.” She promises. “It’s not your fault that you’re hungry.”

The hound huffs. Its head falls limply into the mud, as if waiting, as if intelligent.

”Huh,” Matilda says, “Neat.”

Her shadow pierces the throat of the not-hound in one fluid thrust. As its body is released to lie limply in the mud, its milky eyes blink one final, appraising time—and then seal shut.

—

When Matilda is twenty, she receives a letter.

—

All things considered it is somewhat of a small miracle that it took until Laudna was fifty–or perhaps more accurately twenty and thirty–to give in to her own autophagous body.

In the words of her mother: Any lady worth her salt knows how important feeding herself is.

Bor’dor was a crumb of sustenance, a sip of something cool after decades of ceaseless drought. There is still an ache associated with his death that will likely never leave her entirely, something like guilt and something like resplendent relief. A little like satisfaction. The thought of him is always followed with a low growl; though whether that is the hunting beast in her chest or the warning, begging call of her own hunger she is not certain.

In comparison to his fading and broken soul Otohan’s blade is like drinking straight from the source. Like nectar and honey, sweet and sticky and sluggishly thick in her veins.

They are alike in but one screaming, cleaving way. Like Bor’dor, the mouth-wateringly sweet sensation dripping through her chest is matched only by what follows it: an aching, sharp reminder of emptiness.

One moment she sees Imogen’s face–Imogen, her Imogen–and the next she sees the desaturated kaleidoscope imprints of color behind the lids of her own eyes as power feeds into her chest–and then it's Imogen again. And in the reflection of her distraught eyes she sees it. Herself. As she truly is. As she has likely always been.

It makes her think, for the first time in thirty-five years, of that hound. Delilah’s hound, she knows now. Its mismatched bones and mismatched skin, its aching teeth, its dripping maw. That is what she sees staring back at her in Imogen’s eyes. A salivating mouth. A barghest.

Imogen looks at her—for the first time in all of their time together—with something like distrust and all Laudna can hear is the echo of her own young voice moments before putting the desperate thing out of its misery. It’s not your fault that you’re hungry.

—

She thought, if anyone, Imogen would understand. She doesn’t.

Once Imogen clears the lip of the roof on her descending way back to their collectively shared room, Laudna falls into the shape of a curling wraith in the dark. She wraps her long, wiry arms around her knees and buries her head in the bend of her elbows.

Distantly, a bell chimes. A far away death toll. As if called by its wail, Delilah’s gentle voice rings, They can never understand what we’ve been through.

"She hates me because of you." Laudna hisses, "I think I might, too." 

Delilah clicks her tongue disapprovingly. It echoes in the confines of her skull. Come now, surely you wouldn't doubt her. You can no more rid yourself of love than you can rid yourself of me, dear. Despite our combined best efforts.

The sentiment cements itself in Laudna's chest, ossifying her sluggish heart. It makes her sick. It makes her tired. Delilah continues, And I've not made you do anything. Let us not act like you were not starving. What have I done but indulge your hunger?

"She didn't want me to." Laudna snaps—not unlike a territorial hound, hackles raised at the sight of the hand that feeds. "She didn't want me to. She loves me. She didn't want me to." 

Delilah does something that feels like an almost teasing bite at the heels of her running brain. How could you love something and also allow it to starve?

A sound like a whimper or whine escapes her throat. “She loves me.” She whispers. “She didn’t want me to.”

Delilah pauses. The silence feels twisted, warped. Laudna thinks she might be tilting her phantom head, appraising her, deciding whether best to punish or praise. She can tell because when Delilah tilts her head it feels a bit like her skull is about to explode to make room for the shift. And then, with a calm that suggests she wasn't paying much attention at all: In that case, perhaps you should ask yourself when a tether becomes a leash?

She thinks of Imogen’s hand in hers on the Silver Sun, eyes like the sky at sunrise. She thinks of Imogen’s warm lips pressed against hers in the bustling marketplace of Jrusar, of her hands pillowing her face in the aftermath. Imogen’s beautiful, understanding smile. Her voice saying, Power’s very tempting. And I won’t judge you either way.

Imogen in Zephrah, taking a secret, stolen moment with her on the cliffside. Imogen’s hand in hers. Imogen’s voice, I asked her to bring you back—I asked for help. I prayed to her like she was a God.

Imogen in Whitestone, tears carving her cheeks. Imogen’s voice, I’m gonna try my hardest to make that not happen, alright? 

Imogen in the Feywild, in the trust trials, desperate and aching and sad. Her voice, again, I’m disgusted by the thought of her watching us all the time.

Imogen’s body lifted from the Ruidian soil, glowing a vibrant red. The smile on her face, euphoric. Imogen and Fearne, their bodies or maybe their souls connected—tethered—passing magic between them like sips of water. Was she thirsty? She didn't ask. Laudna would have gotten her water. She’s done it before. So many times.

Laudna sobs, “If it is a leash I’m not the one being held back.”

Oh, Delilah says in a voice that sounds almost as if she were genuinely commiserating, You poor thing. You’re still much too hard on yourself. She loves you, does she not?

Imogen’s voice in The Volition’s hideout on Ruidus, Does that change the outcome? If she’s helping Ludinus, does it matter if she loves me?

”Does it matter?” she cries. “Does it matter if I am a dead end, regardless? She hates you,” she pauses to inhale, the night cooled air passing through her throat like hundreds of tiny knives, “so I will not condemn her to me.”

There is a sweeping sensation in her skull. Pins and needles. Delilah is shaking her head. You’ve still so much to learn, dear.

Laudns sniffs. It’s gross. She’s gross. She should really keep a thing of napkins or wipes on her. For the ichor. “What do you mean?”

The web in Laudna’s brain vibrates as if plucked. The vibration travels through Laudna’s body and into her lungs, forces her into a gasping cough of a sob. Delilah’s spider fingers crawl along her seams in search of prey. You have condemned no one that wasn’t condemned to start.

”Shut up.” She says in an animal hiss, “Shut up. She’s not condemned to anything—”

Anything, Delilah says simultaneously, their voices overlapping, that she has not chosen to condemn herself to, yes.

Laudna shakes her head, her stringy loose hair brushing like spider legs across the back of her neck. “No.” She grits. “No.”

No? All love is a condemnation, of sorts.

Tether. Leash. “You're the condemnation.” She spits, “If you weren’t here—“

Delilah laughs shockingly loud, at odds with her usual sangfroid. Is it truly so fragile for her?

”What?”

Delilah hums and it sounds like a thousand clanging church bells resonating at once. It makes the spider’s web in her skull tremble in response. Darling. Were the roles reversed, would I scare you away from your devotion?

Laudna shakes her head. “Imogen loves me.”

Yes, Delilah chuckles, like she is consoling or tolerating a child, in the way that she loves how you love her. Tell me—all of those nights you woke up to hold and comfort her in the wake of her storm—would she weather yours with you, as well?

”Of course.” Laudna’s reply is immediate. If anyone else might have been listening in they could have mistaken it as defensive, maybe, but—no. No, there is nothing to be defensive of. “Of course she would. She loves me.”

Delilah hums again. Something in her brain is fighting valiantly against the webs and the fingers and the bells. And then the multi-layered susurration of her voice: Then where is she, darling?

Delilah finds the fighting thing first. She sinks her fangs in.

When Laudna picks her ink-stained cheeks up from her knees she is, horrifyingly, all alone. When Delilah’s fangs pull away from the decaying corpse of a piece of a part of Laudna—they are dripping venom.

And when Fearne’s voice rings out, breaking the settling silence of the night with a soft, ’Laudna?’ she feels Delilah skitter away into whatever corner she hides in, whatever corner of Laudna’s brain is not her own.

—-

Later that night, once a relative calm has once more settled over their shared space and Imogen’s relatively stiff body climbs into their shared bed, Laudna stops breathing. An attempt at being considerate and considerately invisible. Imogen doesn’t comment on it, though Laudna knows she notices. Or maybe she just hopes she notices. She’d notice it, were the role reversed. 

Her teeth fit together tightly in her mouth, clenching. That horrid woman. Her wretched words.

And yet, still, Laudna finds herself wondering hopelessly at the truth of them.

Delilah lies. All the time and in innumerable fashion. As often as she lies, though, she tells the truth. She has always been a cornered animal, identifying and utilizing with immediate efficiency that which she thinks will benefit her survival most effectively. Which was this: an outright lie, or a manipulative truth?

She doesn’t know. Maybe she never will. Behind her, Imogen inhales a deep breath that shakes on the exhale. Laudna’s heart clenches in her chest. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Laudna loves Imogen regardless of the magnitude in which it’s returned.

Would Delilah call that pathetic, or would her devotion impress her?

Following the clench of her teeth comes a contortion of her brow as they scrunch together in wrung-out, bone-deep exhaustion.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. What does matter, Laudna realizes, is that it’s unfair.

Not to her, but to Imogen—who she is beginning to realize has not been given the chance to prove Delilah wrong.

She knows Imogen’s breath, the stutter of it if she’s having a nightmare, the tense of her neck if a migraine is about to set in, the clench of her jaw when the voices become too overstimulating, the way her breath shakes on the exhale when she is trying to hold back tears—because Imogen has allowed her to see it. Because brave, beautiful Imogen sits with her ribs and heart bleeding from her chest every day for Laudna to pick apart as she chooses.

And Laudna, in return, has only ever shown her the aftermath. The scars, the stitching, the mended threads. I’ve seen all of you, Laudna.

A trembling, damning thought: that she has not.

When she wakes in the morning to lightning threaded fingers interwoven tightly between her own, she isn't sure whether it's an admission of defeat or declaration of stubborn, bleeding intent.

And if it is the latter, she worries whether Imogen has realized it—that the thought of her love being something that bleeds makes her teeth ache.

—-

There’s no time. There’s never time.

They leave that morning, set across the tundra of Eiselcross in search of FCG’s home city. What happens next is a bleary blur of passing hours and tense traversal and thoughts of how to fix the things she’s broken so rapidfire in her brain that it almost gets her killed as her brain trips and her foot follows and then, finally, with the creaking branches of her mind snapping entirely.

The time Delilah spends at the wheel exists in the same way the world still exists when you close your eyes—lapped in darkness, lacking any form but the print of an impression—nothing concrete but for the simple knowledge of fact that the world did, still, exist. That it would be there when she could wrest control of her own eyes again.

When she did—and this is arguable, whether or not “she” did and not her capable, beautiful family—the world was indeed still there. She opens her eyes to Imogen’s desperate, tear-stricken face, her chapped lips shivering, her lavender eyes swimming and searching. Laudna’s first thought is that she should have brought another coat.

”That can’t happen again,” Imogen whispers tremulously. Her hands are traveling all over, unable to sit still on Laudna’s bleeding body, drenching them in ichor and blood. Some of the bleeding, Laudna knows, was done by Imogen’s hands. I love you, she had said, I’m trusting you. “Laudna. Laudna. That can’t happen again.”

So, Laudna had thought with no small amount of misery, it wouldn’t. 

She had just about made up her mind on a number of things ranging from leaving altogether to suggesting they just keep her in the hole until they need her—it isn’t like she’d be able to break the barrier anyway, what with her atrophied muscle—to begging, pleading to not be left behind, to at least escort her out of this wretched place before—when Ashton brings forth the pinion.

The Pinion of Service, it’s called. There’s something in the back of her head that laughs at that.

The time it takes to get to Essek’s home and formulate a plan passes, again, in an unrecognizable blur of smeared color and voices. She can only stare at this thing that is meant to liberate her, this purple stone Essek is now saying will need to be placed physically within her. That it’s not a guarantee. That Delilah could still take her.

They’re given a handful of hours after that.

For the most part they race around, immediately set out to find ways to make themselves useful for the coming battle. She’s not sure what they’re doing, really. She is still staring at that rock.

What are you doing?

”Laudna?”

You lied.

I’ll fix it—We’ll fix it.

A hand lands on her cheek, suddenly and softly. A gentle strike of lightning. Imogen. “—are you alright? Laudna?”

Her response comes instinctively, bursting from her mouth well before passing through her brain, “Oh, yes. Perfectly fine. Are you alright?”

Imogen’s hand doesn’t leave her cheek. Laudna can see the minute twitches of muscle in her face that mean she is making a valiant and active attempt at appearing neutral. Were she anyone else, she’d be doing a marvelous job. “You aren’t…” She starts, losing the words and picking them up again, “…aren’t nervous?”

Her response comes, again, instinctively and without permit from her mind, “Oh, yes. I’m terrified.”

Imogen makes a noise at this that, like Laudna’s runaway mouth, seems unintentional. It sounds like it should be a wail; like Imogen reached down into some hurting part of herself and smothered it a moment too late. In so doing, she briefly loses the control over her passive expression and Laudna watches her eyes blink rapidly to fight a sudden onset of tears.

In spite of her loose mouth, it would be wrong to say Laudna lifting her hand to cup Imogen’s cheek was a thoughtless action. It would be more accurate to say that loving and comforting Imogen is her natural state of being. It is thoughtless only in that it is instinctive; it is what she is meant to do. It does not shock her to find her hand where it belongs, more at home on Imogen’s skin than attached to her own body, in the way that sometimes her own words take her by surprise.

What does shock her is her next thought, that Imogen might not want Laudna to touch her like this.

It is the first time she’s touched Imogen like this in too long. Others may call this a dramatic thought—a mere 24 hours—but those poor people don’t know Imogen and they certainly don’t know Imogen like Laudna. There’s a part of her that thinks you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who knows or loves anyone like Laudna loves her.

Her palm feels simultaneously numb and over-sensitive with the joy of it. If Imogen doesn’t want her to touch her like this anymore she thinks she’ll die. Or have to cut off her hands to spare them the ache.

”I’m sorry.” She whispers. Her thumb runs over the curve of Imogen’s cheek. “Was that the wrong thing to say?” 

Imogen shakes her head. “There is no wrong thing to say. Not about that. Not about this.”

Laudna doubts that. “I was thinking about the gnarlrock.”

Imogen blinks hard enough that for a moment it brings her entire face together in a swirl of disbelief. “Oh? I—yeah, It’s—We’ve gotta stop fucking with purple rocks, huh?”

She smiles. “Yes, well, hopefully this one will work in our favor.”

Imogen laughs lightly, tremulously; she laughs as if the consequence of not laughing is sobbing. It is one of the few Imogen-sounds that Laudna swears to become less familiar with. “Yeah. Yeah, hopefully.” 

She pauses. Laudna watches her search for words, sees one escape her mouth and her tongue follow in a stripe across her lips, sees another catch in the twitching not-quite-furrow of her brow, sees more pool in her arms as they come to the familiar cross over her chest and stomach. If the rest of Laudna’s life was just this—watching Imogen think, watching her put together puzzles in her brilliant mind—she could be content. Whether the rest of her life encompassed the next hour or not.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      And then, a new shock, Imogen doesn’t find the words at all. Or finds them and discards them. As Laudna watches her drop the search and settle into silence, she realizes she is not the only one that feels as if she is treading water in an open sea. Imogen must also feel it, that threat of any word being the one to pull them under.

That can’t happen again.

”I’m sorry. For that night.”

Imogen’s voice is a rough whisper when it leaves her throat, “The—the night with the gnarlrock?” 

“Yes.”

”I thought we already apologized for that night.”

She shrugs. ”Still, then. I’m still sorry.”

”Laudna,” Imogen releases her name in a sigh, “Don’t.”

Laudna’s mouth shuts with a loud click. She’s sorry for that, too.

Silence settles over them again, heavy in a way it has only been once before. Laudna hates it. Hates the oppressive, suffocating feeling of it and the knowledge that its weight is one she wrest upon them both. Hates that she may only have an hour left to live and she’s spending it with this woman she loves with more ferocity than there are words to convey in this stilted silence. 

It hits her, then. Her lack of time. She turns her face to Imogen, who is staring ahead and working her jaw. Has it hit her, too? It wasn’t so long ago that she was asking Imogen to do this, to be the one to put her down if what came to pass came to pass. It wasn’t so long ago that Imogen crossed continents and planes of existence just to give her the chance to choose to leave her.

”Could I show you something?” Laudna asks. Imogen tilts her head. Her eyes are a weighed-down noose. Laudna whispers, “I don’t know how to say it.”

Imogen straightens her back enough that when she responds she is looking down at her, if only slightly. “Of course, Laudna. Do you mean—“ and she taps her temple with two scarred fingers.

”No, no. I actually—“ and now she straightens, her spine unfurling like rolled parchment, to reach into her bag. When she finds what she’s feeling for, she pulls it out slowly.

At first, Imogen is confused. For a brief moment Imogen is really confused. And then the past few weeks seem to rush back into her mind and she recognizes it—Ashton’s bullshit magical pipe.

”They gave it to me when—that night. To use.”

”Your…proudest moment, yeah?”

Laudna shrugs, “Or ‘kindest’. Up in the air on what they meant, but that's not new for them.”

”No, they love that shit.”

”We should really speak to them about being more clear. Succinct.”

”Concise.”

”Exactly.”

”If we did he’d just get more obnoxiously vague on purpose.”

“That’s true.” Laudna smiles. There is a smaller, matching smile on Imogen’s face. 

“What—“ Imogen starts, “What is it that you want to show me, with this? That you can’t say?”

Laudna toys with the pipe in her hands, twisting and running the pads of her fingers over the runic inscriptions. “I just…” she starts, her voice a barely there whisper, “I want you to know all of me. Selfishly, I do.”

Imogen looks as if she’s about to argue. Laudna stops her by raising the pipe between them both. “This is it. The last piece of me.”

”I don’t think that’s true at all.” Imogen responds shakily. “I think—I think there’s things about you even you haven’t figured out yet, Laudna.”

Laudna smiles at her. What a beautiful thought. What a beautiful mind. She aches with the urge to take her hand. To feel her split-open fingers toy with the ring on her finger. Has she noticed, yet? The shift in placement. The promise she refuses to utter aloud, lest her tendency to break them rear its head. If she has, she has yet to allude to it.

”Maybe.” She responds wistfully. “Still. I would like to show you. I would…” she trails off, fighting back a sudden rise of emotion in her chest. She swallows. “I would like for someone to…to know. In case. You know.”

”I know.” Imogen cries—because she is crying now. Silent, soft rain on her cheeks, the closest thing to an admission of terror and love she’s made all day. And then, miracle of miracles, Imogen takes her free hand into her own and holds tight. “I know.”

She tightens her grip on Imogen’s hand to what she’s sure would be a painful degree for anyone with less atrophied muscle than herself, but is likely just a mild squeeze as is. “Thank you.” She whispers.

Imogen lifts their hands to her tear-stained lips and presses a kiss to their combined joints. She says nothing.

Laudna brings the pipe up and into the light. With a flick, the runes begin to glow. “Well,” she grins, “bottom’s up.”

Imogen laughs against her hand. “Yeah. Bottom’s up.”

She takes the smallest of moments to close her eyes and memorize the feeling of Imogen’s lips on her skin, her laugh in the air. And then, holding tight to those images in her mind, she inhales.

Inhales.

Holds.

Exhales.

The smoke leaves her mouth with a quiet hiss. It gathers in front of her nose and dances in front of her face in many monochromatic swirls. Beside her, Imogen holds her breath.

As the last waves of smoke leave her lips, it gathers in a tight, twisting ball in front of her and then expands—gently, softly—into the vague approximation of shapes and then people and—

The image in front of them is a familiar one. Matilda—who still looks like Laudna, if Laudna were made of a bit more meat and a bit less bone—sits at a dinner table. It’s a smaller one than the dinner table, and though the smoke does not capture the detail Laudna knows which of the four seats surrounding it are missing a leg or chipped to the point of scratching. She knows which of the seats the apparition of her meat-body will choose, just as she knows the vague silhouette of a person entering the scene is her mother, whose hands had been dirtied and frame had been thin and who moved, at that point, with very little of the grace Matilda remembered her harboring when she was younger.

Her mother sits across from her and leans in, exhaustion pulling her bones into the wood and her skin towards the roots. Matilda is talking, hands shooting around expressively like a gnat, as another silhouette—stockier, his torso almost a solid block of smoke—sits next to her mother. She remembers that her father had leaned forward onto his elbows, wringing his hands on the table. Matilda takes a deep breath that shifts her spine of smoke into an almost straight line and then reaches towards something on the table.

She lifts the smoke from the smoke. In her hands is something small and rectangular.

Next to her, Imogen whispers: ”Oh.”

Matilda takes the letter into her hands and without much grace rips it open at the seam. Laudna notices that Matilda’s parents seem to flinch at the action. A few moments pass of her reading, processing, and then Matilda shoots upright. She’s pointing at the letter with one hand and though the smoke, again, does not capture the detail—Laudna knows there is a smile on her face.

”A dinner,” Laudna narrates quietly, as the smog continues to play out the scene in silence before them, “They must have seen something, Mama. They must have seen something in me. I was chosen.”

The smoke stills mid-scene—and then loses its weight entirely, dissipating in the air. That’s fine. Laudna doesn’t really remember the rest with nearly as much clarity.

Imogen is silent next to her. It feels like she is the farthest from her she has ever been and the closest she has been in days. Eventually, she whispers, “Laudna…”

“Even now,” Laudna starts, “Even now—my proudest or kindest or most heroic moment—whatever the fuck Ashton said this thing does—it’s this. Even knowing…do you see?”

Imogen doesn’t move. Laudna doesn’t lift her gaze, not strong enough to witness what damning expression is on her face. “See what?”

”Me.” Laudna chokes, “That’s the end of my life in my hands. Of my parents’ lives. The life of a little girl and her family. Of some fucking—innocent fucking bear, I think, and i’m still—Imogen. It meant I could become something. Something more than some…” she pauses to gather enough venom in her mouth to properly spit the next words, “…some hedge witch.”

Delilah is still temporarily sedated somewhere within her, but Laudna swears she hears the reverberating echo of her depraved chuckle along the rotting walls of her mind at the words. At the reminder of them.

But it’s the truth. She feels the sting of it in her chest still, sinking like teeth into the viscera of her. Maybe Matilda would have chosen better had she known; but, Laudna knows she wouldn’t. If told, here and now, to make that choice again—then damn them. Damn her parents and that innocent family and that bear and herself. Damn everyone who would keep her from this.

Imogen’s hand grips tightly to her shoulder, almost shaking her. “You don’t mean that.” She whispers, “Laudna. Honey, you don’t mean that.”

Laudna lifts her swimming gaze to meet Imogen’s. She grasps at her wrist. Damn everyone who would keep her from this. “Yes, I do.”

Imogen seems unable to process the words, blinking rapidly at her with her mouth hanging slightly open. As if Laudna hasn’t spent every day for over two years reiterating her devotion, her reverence. It doesn’t surprise her. She has tried to keep this part of her love, this part that is taloned, hidden away with purpose. 

It isn’t that Laudna thinks Imogen loves her any less devotedly, any less reverentially; Laudna may not understand it, but she knows that if Imogen were a more selfish person her own love would be just as barbed. Sharply filed. That’s the real issue. When you break it down to its simplest, core problem it isn't that Imogen loves less wholly; it's that Imogen is a better person than Laudna is.

Delilah lies. Except for when she doesn’t. She is not condemned to anything that she did not choose to condemn herself to.

When the day comes and Imogen is asked that inevitable question—your life or the world’s—no matter how much she rages and wails against even the concept of it, she knows in her bones what Imogen will pick.

Laudna may have been making decisions of her own lately with the intention of the “greater good” somewhere tangentially in her mind, but more than that it was this same indelible, innate desire. She consumes Bor’dor’s soul and even through the thick grief of it she feels relief. She consumes what remains of the Willmaster’s on Ruidus and is filled, however briefly, with that same childlike excitement of picking up a letter that will change her life. She consumes Otohan’s killing dagger and her heart beats for what feels like the first time.

Finally, she admits: “I don’t want to lose it all.”

Imogen’s face trips into something akin to despair. Laudna takes her hand. “But, more than that—more than anything—I don’t want to lose you.”

Her final admission: that her love for the world exists only as a refraction of her love for Imogen.

Imogen’s breath leaves her in a stutter. She blinks rapidly. Her eyes are wet, but not yet or no longer leaking. Laudna takes her in unflinchingly, allowing herself what may be a final moment of selfish, feverish desire. It should feel weighted. Instead, Laudna feels as if she could fly, so light is the weight in her chest.

It is then that she notices the lack of a catching gleam on Imogen’s brow and feels the press of cold metal somewhere against the skin of her thigh, where one of Imogen’s hands is pressed to uphold her weight. Laudna feels a small, besotted smile find her lips, trembling at the corners. She reaches out, catches and then tucks away some of Imogen’s soft lavender curls. Imogen startles at the touch.

Laudna breathes hard through her nose as their eyes meet again. Some ugly and sticky sort of soft chuckle. “You’re going to give yourself a headache, love.”

“I—You—“ Imogen tumbles over the words, wrestles them in her mouth. Laudna recognizes the look on her face the way one recognizes the clouds before a storm. What Laudna cannot decide on is if that means she should seek shelter, or if it is something they can weather.

Imogen must hear her train of thought—which, of course she can—because suddenly her focus solidifies into something incontestable. Her brow is still furrowed, her eyes still wide and wet and wonderful. Laudna is almost excited to hear her final verdict, if only as an excuse to witness that fire again.

But then, Imogen says: “My turn.”

”What—“

Whatever would have come out of her mouth is lost to the sudden flurry of Imogen across her lap, snatching the pipe from limp hands and inhaling deeply all before Laudna regains enough awareness to even comprehend the movements.

Imogen, of course, is thrown immediately into a fit of coughing.

”Oh, Imogen—it wasn’t—I would’ve just handed it to you. I wouldn’t have fought you over it.”

Imogen coughs hard into her elbow, smoke still leaving her lungs and tears in her eyes. She waves her hands in an effort to convey what Laudna assumes amounts to shut up. 

Laudna finds herself suddenly filled with a desperate sadness for all those months Imogen spent pining in silence, because more than anything in this moment Laudna wants to kiss her. Aches with the desire to kiss her. She cannot imagine the agony of this moment stretched out over the course of months. Then again, Laudna highly doubts she'd be half as endearing choking on smoke.

She does her the courtesy of focusing instead on the rising stone-grey cloud spilling from her mouth as it coagulates into an image she recognizes at once.

The smoke presents it in monochrome, but Laudna knows that field and that hill and the exact hue of pink-purple flowers that litter it like stars. She recognizes that dilapidated cabin, that crowd of slobbering people. She recognizes Imogen. She recognizes, barely, herself.

There is no sound but she knows, as clearly as she can remember the echo of Matilda’s voice, the echo of Imogen’s as her silhouette turns to Laudna’s. We’re gonna have to hold off on the courtesies until later.

She knows every moment of what comes next in perfect detail. Imogen, powerful from the first moment, turning that potential onto the crowd. Imogen taking her hand, leading them both fearlessly into some unknown. She remembers the way Imogen’s hands felt in hers that first time, still radiating static. She remembers the warmth of her voice. I just want you here, next to me.

She watches it all unfold again in front of her, utterly taken. At some point Imogen stops coughing next to her and falls silent as well. Smoke-Imogen reacts to Smoke-Laudna’s response in a way that Real-Laudna can still feel the warmth of, as Smoke-Laudna confirms this new and beautiful partnership. And with what Laudna knows are matching, final, incandescent smiles, the smoke fades.

She watches it dissipate for a moment, overcome with a desire to contain it, somehow. To take the smoke back within herself if only to hold onto the tangible memory of it a touch longer. Instead, she turns to Real-Imogen, who is already looking at her.

Her eyes are determined, if still drowning. She twists to grasp at the junction of Laudna where her throat meets her shoulder. “You see?” She whispers. “Doesn’t matter what you do. Doesn’t matter what choices you make. I’m never gonna regret you, Laudna. I’m never gonna think being with you was a mistake.”

Laudna feels pressure behind her eyes building rapidly, but Imogen continues, “I want you to see it so bad, Laudna. The way I love you—it’s—you saved my life that day, as much or more than I saved yours. You can’t—You aren’t going to convince me you’re a bad person, Laudna. You’re not.”

Imogen takes Laudna’s face in the palms of her hands, split-open fingers cradling her jaw. She pauses long enough to lick her dry lips. “You were chosen.”

Laudna nods, thick tears like a river of tar leaving her cheeks sticky. ”I was chosen.” 

”You were. She did choose you.” She concedes. Her voice trembles. “But so did I. Laudna. I did, too.”

And, really, how is anyone meant to respond to that aside from how Laudna then does: by breaking.

She collapses forward, throws the barely there weight of her body into Imogen’s arms, curls her own too-long ones tightly around Imogen's waist and back. She whispers in a hoarse, tear-choked voice, “You’re my best friend.”

Imogen, equally choked up, returns the tight grip tenfold. Laudna feels the heat of her shivering breath when she responds, “You’re my best friend, too.”

Laudna gasps against her skin, “If I don’t make it—If she wins—just—thank you. My very first best friend. My very first.”

Imogen coughs into her neck, squeezes her tighter. “Don’t forget Pâté.”

Or Bella, Laudna thinks, chuckling wetly into Imogen’s hair. “Fine.” She presses a damp, too-deep kiss to Imogen’s hairline. She says against her skull, canines grazing against her skin with every syllable, “Thank you, love. My love.”

She feels Imogen’s fingers grip like claws into the skin of her biceps and a buckling, crippling sob bury itself into her shoulder. And then Imogen pulls back, releases the hold on her arms to once again cradle her face and simply holds her there, runs her gaze over all of Laudna’s blemishes and bloodstains and ichor. She lets her fingers graze across the blades of her cheekbones, the dip of her brow, the bend of her nose, the shadow of her lips. 

Laudna does not think nor hope for a kiss. If only because she does not need it to demonstrate herself anymore. If only because Imogen loves her and that is enough.

Eventually, Imogen nods. “Thank you.” She whispers. There are still tears cutting down her cheeks. Her brows set with determination. “Let’s go set you free.”

—

When Delilah Briarwood is seventy-three—or, perhaps, forty-four and thirty-three—she watches the face of the girl she once invited to dinner fill with something like animal satisfaction as she locks her away in the hollow of her chest, right next to her still slow-beating heart.

Behind that girl’s frail ribcage, beneath her extensive collar, in front of her shifting scapula–it appears to Delilah through the filter of a purple veil of arcane glass as if she is surrounded by many undulating teeth.

—

The first thing she asks for in the aftermath–or, perhaps, the aftermath of the aftermath–is a bath.

And the bath looks lovely, really. The decor it seems Essek and his partner keep isn’t anything as ostentatious as what they had access to in Whitestone, but it’s big enough for two and the water hot enough to burn. And Imogen is there. Imogen is pouring some kind of lovely oil into the tub that smells truly divine and swirling her fingers into the mix, spreading it throughout. It rises along with the steam into the room and fills the air with the scent of something soft and floral and lovely. The light from Imogen’s scars reflects off of the undulating surface like many refracted, tiny pink-purple auroras. It’s lovely. Imogen is lovely.

Imogen is looking at her. Has been for more than a few seconds, by the concern settling into the softness of her face. Oh. Well. It isn’t like Delilah was the cause for her wandering mind. Or the ichor. If the subtle gray smear of it on Imogen’s chin is anything to go by. 

“Laudna?”

Oh! There she goes again, wandering. Always wandering, even in stillness. She should really—“Yes?”

Imogen’s brows join together over the bridge of her nose. “Do you—Are you—“

She juggles the words in her mouth for a moment, bites her lip, and then seems to give up with a sharp, sardonic exhalation of air that could be considered some type of laugh. Her head drops, hanging limp from her shoulders for a long moment before she picks it back up and levels her with a stare that is equally as soft and tender and affectionate as it is determined. Determined? Determined for what?

She lifts her hand from the porcelain edge of the tub, “C’mere, Laudna.”

Laudna does. No amount of her mind’s wandering would lead her to anywhere but Imogen’s hands, anyway.

As their hands find each other and lace together, Imogen stands from the edge in full to meet her. She brings her other hand up to Laudna’s face, uses two fingers to brush oily strands of hair back behind her ear and then, without ever disconnecting, runs them lightly over her jaw to cup her cheek in the warmth of her palm. It’s nice. Still nice. She’s glad she still runs cold. 

She’s not sure she’d trade dealing with Delilah in perpetuity for something that would diminish how Imogen makes her feel. 

Imogen smiles up at her, as if in response to the thought. Which, well, is possible. “Can I join you? I—I mean, I was assuming, but I’d like to ask—“

”Please.” She responds immediately. She hasn’t been alone since the ritual, hasn’t had a moment to really think about—and no one’s really asked, yet—about what it means—“Imogen. Yes. Please.”

Imogen’s smile stretches to display her teeth, then. She loves it. Imogen’s smile and Imogen’s teeth. She hates that so few people love Imogen’s bite. She loves that Imogen is unafraid to have fangs with her. “Alright. Alright. Here, lemme—“ She reaches down to take Laudna’s other hand as well, pulling her along gently, “Tell me if it’s scalding enough for you.” She teases. Laudna smiles. She smiles because even if it wasn’t scalding it would be enough.

Not that that matters, as she steps into the water and to her admitted delight it settles on her skin like wet flame. It draws a sigh from her lungs that is purely pleasure. She hears Imogen swallow behind her, the supporting grip on her hands tightening ever so slightly. Laudna laughs, then. “And I thought I was being insatiable.”

Imogen coughs. “Can you blame me? From nothing to you? I’m making up for a twenty-eight year dry spell over here.”

”From nothing to me,” Laudna repeats, the words leaving her in the light bounce of a laugh, “I suppose the bar was low.”

”Laudna.”

”Hm?”

Imogen rolls her eyes. It is deeply fond. Laudna can’t roll her eyes or they’ll get stuck there. She says, “You know that’s not what I meant. ‘Sides,” and here her eyes darken, “I’d argue the bar was very high. Maybe I was saving myself for someone.”

Laudna grins, lowers herself fully into the water with a deep sigh, and reaches a hand up to cup Imogen’s chin, “Oh, yes, you truly are the pinnacle of purity, darling.” She runs her thumb over the fat of Imogen’s bottom lip. Her finger comes away with a soft stain of gray. She watches Imogen’s stomach clench, sees her physically restrain herself from chasing Laudna’s thumb with her teeth and tongue. “Though, I can’t help but feel as though if I had abs we could’ve been doing this a long time ago.”

Imogen gasps through a smile, blushing and vaguely scandalized, “Laudna!”

Laudna laughs fully, reaching to take Imogen’s hand again in her own and bringing it up to her lips to press two quick, soft kisses to the skin. “I’m teasing, darling.” That’s what people do, right? With their partners. Surely Delilah—or maybe Sylas—well. She should really stop trying to be suave. She presses a third, even lighter kiss to Imogen’s knuckles and then her voice asks, even more lightly, “Get in?”

A sound not dissimilar to a whine leaves Imogen’s chest; though, to Laudna’s ears it sounds—well, firstly, beautiful—but, secondly more like something vaguely distraught than aroused. Maybe she shouldn’t find it beautiful then. If it’s distraught. There shouldn’t be anything beautiful about Imogen in distress.

Imogen stands. One of her hands runs up and over Laudna’s shoulder and then settles against the nape of her neck, where she presses lightly for Laudna to lean forward. Laudna does, feels Imogen step in behind her, and then feels strong thighs bracket either side of her body, settling into her sides. God, she really needs to get Imogen a horse. For her thighs.

She settles fully, Imogen’s stomach pressing up flush against Laudna’s naked back, her arms circling around her waist and knotting at her stomach to press them even closer. She noses at the skin behind Laudna’s ear. Laudna sighs again and whispers, “Hi.”

”Hi,” Imogen whispers back, “I love you.”

The infinite amount of hopes she could hang on that sentence. The things she could build from its bones. She could bundle it up and give it strings and a name and a form and gift it back to her. She presses back, tries in vain to fuse their skin where it meets. Turns her head to brush their noses, and their lips together, “I love you, too. More than anything.”

Imogen kisses her. It feels like it lights her up from within. Which reminds her—and she pulls back—“Could you—I’m sorry, but—“

”Anything.” Imogen interrupts urgently, pressing her lips then to the corner of her mouth. “Anything.”

Laudna hums. Her chest flickers. “I—hm—I feel. Um. Unclean, still. I think. And I don’t—“ her hands, squeezing down on her throat—her hands, running from sternum to stomach and flaying herself open—“I don’t think my hands can—will work. They’ll smear. Does that make sense? I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize.” Imogen says, and then holds her breath for a long moment. Laudna feels her eyes sweep over the whole of her, analyzing. She can always tell when someone is analyzing her, when their gaze is picking apart her muddy pieces and deciding where the worst parts or the easiest-to-cripple parts of her lie. She wonders, What do you think are the worst parts of me? Where would you shoot to kill?

And then thinks: Do you know that if you told me that I would break it within myself, that worst part? If you told me where you’d shoot I would paint you a target. Bullseye. I would never have you miss.

And then, more simply: Love me still. Please. Whatever you find. Tell me which parts of me to keep and I will tend to them. Tell me which parts to lose and they will burn. Please. I promise you can make something lovely out of broken parts.

It’s strange. In the aftermath—the immediate aftermath—Laudna was shocked to find herself filled to the brim with what she could only figure to be abundant, valiant joy. There is a contentedness now glowing purple in her chest that she did not expect and that is only now beginning to wane. There is the feeling of freedom, finally, freedom so light in her bones she could float away with it, but still there is that dreadful thought: that she stains.

She fears that if she looks for herself, if she wipes the grime and the sweat and blood and ichor away from not her body but her mind, she won’t be able to parse what dark parts were Delilah and what is just herself, as she has always been.

Finally or suddenly, Imogen presses another kiss to the portion of skin where her shoulder melts into her throat. She says, softly, “Of course. But, first—“ and shifts, hands landing on Laudna’s hips and pushing her softly, sliding her away so as to turn and ask, “Can you do me, really quick?”

Laudna takes a moment to remember what she was even responding to; but, Imogen smiles, her cheeks and throat still gray and, oh, there’s some in little shapes across her chest, too, and she had forgotten she did that—did she do that? Or did Imogen. She can’t remember.

Imogen says, more softly, “You’re not gonna stain. Promise.”

She blinks, recognizes for the second time the blank amount of space above Imogen’s brow where once a shield sat. Right.  ”Oh. Yes, of course.”

So she does. She turns to face Imogen, their legs an awkward tangle between them. She grabs the soft rag Imogen had lain on the edge of the tub and the bar of subtly scented soap besides—Imogen stops her.

“Just these.” Imogen says, pressing her thumb insistently into the center of Laudna’s damp palm. “You can—the soap is—yes, please, I am gross, but—just these. If that's okay?” 

”Of course. Of course, darling.”

So just the soap, then. She squeezes it in her hands, spreading bubbles and oil along her fingers, dips it all into the water and then repeats the process once more.

She dips one hand—the one not in charge of the soap—into the water, capturing as much in the cup of her palm as she can. She runs the very tip of her fingernail over Imogen’s navel and between the valley of her breasts and sternum as she brings it up from the surface, all the way up to her collar where she loosens her hold in a slow glide. She watches it run from one end of Imogen’s collar to the other, down her carved open chest in a quick and then catching glaze.

She thinks her own chest flickers again like candlelight in a breeze. She runs her hand more firmly over the upper-most curves of Imogen's split-open skin. “You're so beautiful.”

Imogen hums. She whispers, “So are you.”

Laudna shakes her head. Not in disagreement but in disbelief. Not of Imogen's words but of her. The vision of her. Imogen opens her mouth—likely in misplaced protestation—and as much as Laudna adores the cleansing sound of her voice it isn’t what she needs, right now. What she needs is—there—her mouth on Imogen’s wet collar, the feeling of Imogen’s jaw tensing against her hairline.

“Baby,” Imogen gasps, and then laughs, “And you were teasing me.”

“Am teasing you, arguably.” Laudna mutters against her skin, which, fuck, she just said she should stop that. The teasing. But Imogen’s breath does a funny hiccuping thing that Laudna has very quickly learned in the past two weeks means that she is doing something well. Or right. Right or well. They aren't always the same thing with her.

She leans up to press her lips to the cut of Imogen's jaw. She says, “Sorry.”

Imogen leans down; She kisses her. She says against her lips, “Don't be.” 

She tastes—it reminds her—”Oh,” she says aloud, and brings her other hand—the soapy one—up to Imogen's face as well. She runs her soapy thumb firmly along Imogen’s chin, watches the white suds go charcoal-smear gray. Her tongue suddenly feels trapped behind her teeth, like it's swollen, like it's a worm trying to break the seal of her lips for nutrients or sunlight.

She bites down on the wriggling traitor in her mouth, incisors cutting into the flesh with the sharp tang of whatever sludge runs through her veins. Later. Later. She flexes her hands the slightest bit against where they lay at Imogen’s jaw. Just these, she had asked. Just these.

She brings the very bottom of either of her palms to greet each other just below the curve of Imogen’s chin with such reverence that it is almost not touching her entirely. Which is counter. So she presses the slightest bit more, where it is more than shared water that connects them but skin-to-skin directly, and runs her soap-laden thumbs in dragging soft circles over, first, the fat of Imogen’s freckled cheeks.

Imogen’s head lulls into the cradle of her hands, eyes fluttering closed, a bird landing in the damp safety of her creaking, rotting limbs. Their noses brush; Laudna angles her head just so that she can press her lips to the skin there, as her fingers circle and circle and circle and lower, finding themselves behind her ears, now, angling her head up just so that she can press her lips to Imogen’s with no pressure behind it at all. And then lower—the dip of her chin—Laudna curls her thumbs under the sharp cut of Imogen’s jaw so that her nails scrape with a barely there presence against Imogen’s sensitive skin; it still manages to bring forth a trembling sigh from Imogen’s mouth and onto the bridge of Laudna’s trailing nose as she presses her lips more firmly against the subtle shadow below the protrusion of her bottom lip.

She leans back. Her hands drift without disconnecting, twisting, following lavender strikes of lightning and freckled constellations to where her mouth had been. The index and middle fingers of both hands press into the skin there, wiping away the still subtle smear of ichor, stretching up to run lightly over Imogen’s lips. Imogen’s eyes are still blissfully closed, head limp in Laudna’s gentle grasp. Her mouth opens against the barely there press of her fingers and her stomach does that desperate rolling thing it did earlier and this time she does not stop herself—nor open her eyes—as she tilts her chin up so that her tongue meets the lines of Laudna’s index and then further to close her mouth entirely around them and groans—

Laudna comes back to herself, eyes blinking open as if from a dream and face—somehow—buried in the storm-marked expanse of Imogen’s collar. She hooks her fingers into and under Imogen’s mandible, fingers pressing into the wriggling, traitorous worm in Imogen’s mouth as she turns her head to the side and rises back up. Imogen exhales hard through her nose. Laudna kisses her open mouth.

“Not that you aren’t unbelievably sexy,” She whispers, “like, sincerely, holy shit—but, doesn’t that taste like soap?”

Imogen blinks slowly, eyelids heavy as she processes what Laudna said and then chuckles around the joints of her fingers. When the words finally do land, Laudna watches her face scrunch together and a vague sound of displeasure vibrate from her chest. She gently grabs Laudna’s wrist and pulls it from her lips, eyes sparkling. She responds, face still a little lop-sided in its distaste, “Yeah, actually, now that you mention it. Yuck.”

“Yuck, she says.”

Imogen grins. “Incredibly rude of me.”

“Immeasurably so.”

“When you were so considerate with your hands.”

“I do try.”

“A punishable offense, one might say.”

Laudna raises a sharp, simultaneously authoritative and teasing brow. “Is that a request?”

Roses bloom in Imogen’s cheeks, unrelated to the heat of their bath. “Thinly veiled.”

They’re both grinning, their eyes taking in the other in a joyful ouroboros. Imogen’s hands lift from below the water to frame Laudna’s still-flushed face. She softens. “You know,” she whispers, “I was trying to do something super sweet and romantic and heartfelt just there and you went and made it raunchy.”

Laudna grins wider, tilts her head to press her lips to Imogen’s dripping palm. “Would it help to know that even the raunchy bits are also super sweet and romantic and heartfelt with you?”

Laudna chases a river of condensation down Imogen’s wrist with her lips, and Imogen scrunches her eyes and nose in that immeasurably attractive way in response. She giggles, ”Alright, casanova, scooch up.”

Laudna, somewhat reluctantly, does. “What’s a casanova?”

Imogen shrugs, “A bard, I think, or something.”

“You think I’ve the energy of a bard.” Laudna mock-gasps.

Imogen laughs, “I think you’ve the energy of a romantic.”

“Oh. So he’s a romantic bard. That’s the most annoying kind, Imogen.”

“Jeez,” Imogen sighs, lathering her voice with humor and her hands in soap, “Evidently, I’m not very good at the romantic bit.”

Laudna collapses forward, heavy with the mixed weight of joy she doesn’t know where to place and an emptiness she is unsure how to fill, and presses her lips hard to the dip of Imogen’s collar. “That’s not true in the slightest.”

She stays there with her nose pressed to Imogen’s now freshly scented skin. Imogen’s chest dips in quick beats as she chuckles softly against the crown of Laudna’s head and then presses her lips there. “I’ll take your word for it. C’mere.”

A hound to her call, she does. Imogen gently pushes at her shoulder to spin her around where she once again settles between her thighs. 

Imogen starts with her shoulders. The lightning fissures of her hands softly land on the bony protrusions of her scapula and undulate in waves until they meet in the middle atop the bony protrusions of her spine. Gentle, reverent, revelatory. Part of Laudna wishes for the bite of her nails.

Imogen huffs behind her and then kisses, quickly, the back of her neck, “Maybe when you're feeling a bit more settled, yeah?”

Settled is a very nice way of putting it. Imogen is being very nice about it. About that awful piece of undeniable hollowness in the wake of what should be solely freeing. That hunger that is all her own, simmering now instead of at a rolling boil. She is being so accommodating for such an ugly piece of her.

That awful little romantic bard part of her might say that’s what love is. She’s sure that awful little hound part of herself would nip at its heels until it was doing some awful jig in her mind.

She spares a glance for the layered, broken tissue marring her chest. All these parts of her she wishes to be done with. All these parts of her she can't comprehend loving. All these parts of her Imogen loves, anyway.

Imogen’s arms wrap around her, settling on the purple luminance of her heart. If Laudna squints her eyes just so, the lines on Imogen’s skin match. It makes her seem cut-through with Imogen. Intertwined. Entangled. Imogen takes her fingers and runs them gently down her alight ribs, "We'll need to keep an eye on the stitches, make sure nothing gets infected.” She whispers gently. “It’ll scar, but it'll heal."

The breath in her chest trips, like the air in her lungs was a running thing and the words put a stutter in its step. Behind her, Imogen stills. Laudna, again, feels the trace of her eyes as they follow a thought pass over her face. After a moment, she squeezes her tightly against the naturally warm, vibrant rupture of her own skin. She says again, stronger this time, "Laudna. It’ll leave a scar.” She kisses the cutting edge of Laudna’s trembling jaw and then, more softly, the permanently light ring of bruising around her neck. “But it will heal."

Yes, Laudna thinks. It just might.

There is another part of herself waking up within–neither the hound nor the awful romantic bard nor Matilda nor Delilah–something blinking drowsily awake like a newborn at the world. She isn’t sure what to call it, isn’t sure it has a name yet. It is being cradled in the mess of her mind in hands shattered by red and purple storm, slowly coaxed awake by the gentle rumble of loving thunder and the caress of open air.

She isn't sure what to call it  as it takes in the warm, safe bed of Imogen’s doting palms, but she thinks it has wings.

—

Almost two years after the scattering of the divine, four years after Imogen, twenty-two and fifty-two years after her arrival on the world, Laudna begins to feel something like peace.

She realizes this with her hand buried in Carpaccio Caviar’s thick, sticky fur, as he pants with his tongue hanging loosely from his barely held together jaw, draping over exposed bone and ligament. He looks up at her with one wet black orb of an eye and the other a glowing, magenta gathering of magic in the concave of an exposed socket. Slobber like tar drips from his heaving gums.

She knows now. Caviar is hers. Not a manifestation of Delilah, not a taunting reminiscence of that shrew woman’s view. She feels the difference now between the uncomplicated call and response of her own innate magic and the demand and force of Delilah’s. She thinks the once effortless question of power was one of her many plays, an attempt at obfuscating the truth. Now, in her pettiness, she has exposed herself. Herself and Laudna, both.

From beneath her hand he lets loose a ghastly bark, looking out at one of his favorite playmates.

Ashton, who is visiting for the first time in a few weeks but the nth time in as many months, is half-crouched in what is hip-high grass to her and waist-high grass to him with a half gnawed bone gripped in his hands. He smiles with all his teeth in that unique Greymoore-grin of his that seems more-than-vaguely angry. Behind him, in the far distance, she can just make out The Key Breaker bobbing lightly in the wind, awaiting Ashton’s return and departure.

“C’mon, mutt!” They laugh. “Fucking come and get it!”

Caviar gives a low huff and looks up at her as if saying Can I? Can I? She scratches behind his cropped ears. “Go on, then.” She smiles. “Make a mess of yourself.”

Caviar licks her hand once and then takes off, bounding after a cackling Ashton. She watches them for a few seconds, Ashton taunting him with the bone and juking left and right, before that violently sweet grin of his is back and he yells, “Get this!” and throws the bone directly into one of his swirling multi-colored portals as hard as he can. The bone jettisons from the air sixty feet away and flies even further than that. Caviar wastes no time.

“Good luck, fucker!” Ashton yells after him, stepping backwards lazily in Laudna’s direction. He pivots on his heel to face her.

“God, that thing’s the fucking coolest.”

Laudna scoffs. “That thing has a name.”

“Yeah that rules, too.”

Laudna rolls her eyes. Miraculously, they don’t get stuck. Ashton tilts their head at her, twisting the lopsided cut of their smile. “So.” They start, falling back with their full body into the dirt and grass with a loud thump. Their body breaks the threshold for a moment like one would break the surface of water. “How you doing?”

Laudna crouches down next to him gently, the maroon weave of her dress drifting in the calm breeze. The hand-stitched florals lining her skirt sway along with the grass. She chuckles down at him. “How am I doing?”

He hums in affirmation, angling his head just enough to look up at her. His green eye catches the light of the setting sun like the heath around them, suffusing his perpetually sardonic gaze with syrupy warmth. She reaches a too long, bony finger to poke their nose. Their face twists with the quiet sound of shifting shale. “I’m not the one galavanting around Exandria.” She points out.

He scoffs. When he turns his head to sit up, the sun catches his other eye and dissipates amongst the iris like heavy fog. He leans forward onto his now bent knees, his stone chin hitting the base of his palm with a soft, marble clatter. “Exactly. You’re not.”

Years ago their tone might have set her on the immediate defensive, and here still she feels the rising tide of her anger answer to their every provocation. But she knows them, and she knows now how all of their sharpness is only ever the lightest graze. They do not know how to feel or be felt softly; they are not built for gentleness. Perhaps that has always been their mutual connection. The cut of stone and the cut of bone, indelible despite every attempt to soften the blow. She’s never met another living thing that bleeds the same sluggish color as her.

But though she knows them well her voice still leaves her with the slightest of accusatory undercurrents, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His heavy hands raise up to his fractured ears in surrender. “Just wondering if you’re getting antsy is all.”

“Are you about to ask Imogen and I to go on another little bout with you? Is that what this is leading to?”

“It’s not leading to anything.” He lies.

“Will Imogen not approve? Is that why you’re asking me first?” She gasps suddenly and harshly, hands arising to her cheeks, “Do you think I’d lie to my wife?”

“No, gods, don’t fucking–don’t you dare tell her I was telling you to do that!” He says seriously, as close to real fear as he’s been since his arrival. “She’ll never let me hear the fucking end of it.”

“Then what?” She hisses, impatient. “Stop being so fucking vague all the time.”

Again, he scoffs. “You love me.”

“I would love you more if you practiced speaking with some clarity. You know, I still don’t know what exactly that pipe does? To this day, Ashton!” 

“Fine, fine.” They grunt, angling their head once more towards the setting sun. The light cuts their face into hard planes, emphasizing the minute fissures scattered across their skin. When it hits the gilded edges of their scars, it seems to drip like something molten; for a moment, both of their arms match. “I was being pretty fucking clear, though. For the record.”

“About the pipe?”

“The—oh, I have no fucking idea. I haven’t seen that in weeks. Left it with Milo, I think. Shit, I need to remember to get that back.”

“Ashton. What did you mean?”

He shrugs. “Just that you and Imogen have been here for a bit. An uninterrupted bit.”

“You’re here,” she taunts, “I’d hardly call that uninterrupted.”

“Hah Hah. Look, I’m just saying. It was busy as fuck and now it’s not. One of you sucked in a god eater a few years ago and the other—” they gesture to the hallowed lilac glow of her chest, the shadowed image of her ribs turned cage, “—the other likes to interrupt previously uninterrupted moments. Sometimes.”

She hums. “Am I the other in this equation, or…?”

They shrug again. “Take your pick, I guess.”

There is a snapping sensation in her chest. Caviar has finally caught up with his wayward bone. She sighs. The lilac blossom of her chest flutters and flickers with the motion. “It’s been quiet.” She concedes. “Unusually so. I can’t imagine what Imogen feels, after so much time with so many people in her head to have this—but, it’s quiet even for me. So it must be jarring for her as well.”

“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly had a serene head-space yourself.”

As subtle as he gets. She smiles. “No, I guess I haven’t.”

The aforementioned quiet settles over them now, soft like a shawl. Uninterrupted. He—gently as he can—elbows her gangly elbow with his own. “You’re good?”

Laudna nods. The breeze whispers across her face, picking strands of her hair up in a swirling, sunlit dance. “Yes.” She says, “I think so.”

Ashton smiles. A real smile, lacking all the violence of their usual grin though with just as much cut. They open their mouth to reply—and then get a mouthful of rotting wolf fur. “Fuck!”

“Oh, good boy, Caviar!”

—

That night, after Ashton said their goodbyes with the stubbly ground coffee feeling of their lightest and tightest hug weighing on both she and Imogen’s shoulders, she stays awake to watch Imogen fall asleep.

It is a normal night, brilliantly cool outside and redolent with the smell of freshly baked bread, carved wood, and drying paint. They carry the joy of having their family visit to bed, allow it to make their steps light and exuberant and full with the weight and warmth Laudna knows only love to bring. She dips—with the helpful aid of a thoughtfully cast telekinesis—a giggling Imogen down onto their shared sheets. She crawls over top of her trembling, sacrosanct body and presses her reverently into their mattress and doesn’t let up until Imogen is trembling from something altogether different and then falls bonelessly into slumber.

Imogen—face relaxed as it ever is, alight scars dim along with her resting mind—suspects nothing as she fades into beautiful, earned, dreamful rest.

She runs her fingers over the round curve of Imogen’s cheek, leans in to press her lips to the cut of a lavender strike of lightning splitting her jaw. She closes her eyes, inhales the vanilla and leather and ozone of the other half of her soul, and drifts—

—into the murky, thick dark of her own heart.

There is not silence but a roaring, like the underwater cacophony of the ocean that is both muffled and all encompassing. Like when you’ve yelled too harshly, too much, and your heart pressures your blood until it’s pounding in your ears. That is what it is: not silence but pressure, building.

She stands from her knelt position—how she always arrives here, as if summoned from the ground in a rising swell of ink that takes her shape—and turns to the cage casting a long, vibrant, fragmented purple gleam behind her.

Delilah sits where she always will, shackled to a wall Laudna can’t see. Her body is translucent, shifting like green flame in the shape of a lithe, desecrated woman. She stares, as she always does, directly at Laudna.

Laudna crouches down in front of the glass. She smiles in a way that feels like a gash. “Hello.”

“When I get out of here I will use what remains of your tattered soul to suffocate that woman. I will do it with your hands.”

The smile does not leave Laudna’s face. If anything, the wound grows wider. “All this time and still no nicer.”

“And then I will bring her back and I will do it again and again and again. I will throw you a thousand dinners.”

“Do you feel trapped?” Laudna questions gleefully. She leans forward to press her forehead against the glass. It paints her grey skin lilac.

Delilah grits her teeth. Frayed, loose hair falls sporadically in front of her face. She spits, “Don’t you?”

Laudna ignores her. “I keep dreaming. I’ve never dreamed before. Not like this.”

Delilah ignores her. “I will use your hands to grow new sun trees and I will use your hands to make a spectacle of everyone you love—”

“—Do you have something to do with it?”

Delilah laughs like a harsh bark. “I would never give you dreams. I would fill your mind with images of your father—do you remember him? The glint of his skin? Sylas was so steady with his hands.”

“Good.” Laudna interrupts, “Good. If it isn’t you then it’s me.”

Suddenly Delilah’s forehead is pressed right up against her own, across the glass. Her arms are pulled taught behind her, almost erupting from their sockets. She hisses, “Don’t your teeth ache, Laudna? Laudna, don’t you want to go hunting again?”

“Fuck you.” She spits, and then wakes up.

Her lips are still pressed to Imogen’s jaw, meeting her skin again and again gently like the steady lapping of waves with every rise of the other woman’s breath. Around them is quiet, uninterrupted. She presses another, more intentional kiss to the corner of Imogen’s mouth. She whispers, “Sweet dreams, my love.”