li'yera aurel

“How are you usually put up for the holiday?” “A temporary yurt is arranged for me.” “You would…be welcome to stay at my cottage, if you liked. But I understand if you’d prefer your privacy, too.” “…You would be comfortable with me in your space for that long?” “I think so. Trust you, and enjoy being around you. Miss you when you’re gone.”

“You honored them in your skin. You kept your promises. No one could ever ask any more of you.” “[Thank you.]”

The function of a growl is as a warning. It is a communication that violence is available as a tool, but is not preferred. Other outcomes, besides your death, are available and should be considered.

But the creature that wants to kill you will not growl.

If your death is the goal, then growling will only serve as a delay and may result in your escape, which runs counter to the goal. There will be no growl, no warning. There will be no snarl or hiss or bluster. The creature that bares its teeth with the intent to kill only does so to bring closer its fangs to your demise.

The creature that growls does not want to kill you, but will if it must.

“I’ve been invited to a party and would hate to go alone. Figured I’d coerce the little lady herself to join me?” “Coerce, he says. How much of your soul are you willing to part with?” “It’s adorable that all the things I’ve done, you still think I have an ilm of that left.” “Then you’ll have no quarrel with my plunder of what remains.” “As if I ever did.”

There is little more to be done in this city, its military equipped and its citizens empowered, and outside has calmed enough for a clear path home. You are lost to sound and color, borne on aetherial currents towards a well-earned rest, and entwined with your new, nameless power is a strengthened seed of hope.

the final days: fates defied

“…I have been giving more thought to hobbies of late,” she’d said to her Duskwights on a gentle afternoon. “Inventing has been lovely, but on some level it is still work.”

So you choose something reserved for little girls or for lonely, deranged adults?

Well, aren’t you both?

Kowa buys the damn doll.

It’s not - exactly what she wants, slumped in the one-gil bin, but her true vision is a choice between learning more skill than she cares to or asking someone who knows woodworking for help. This entire interest is silly, force-fed womanhood, so best to go with the path of least resistance if she insists on walking one at all. 

The thing is hideous. The gingham dress is dingy and frames a rictus of a smile. She shears it naked and tosses it into a solvent, its paint curdling into colorless muck - an artisan would weep, whatever, who else lives here to fret over how she spends her bells? Death, almost preferred to this grating idleness. I went mad in our summer home, once said a duchess that Kowa broke over her knee; she understands now, melting.

No corpses to aid with before her basement crawl in three suns, the Lodge infirmary too much for a headache, her red novels woefully sour, and a wooden foot sticking out of the pot. Fine. It slides out breech on a dull sennight end, amniotic in its slick.

Better, cleaned, though the stringy hair is beyond saving. She scrounges for an old stocking and parts with a lock of her own tresses, makes an afternoon of a tiny wig. The redone cottage is nice to sew in, she thinks while eschewing dinner, vindictiveness to the fireplace. Her new waterfalls burble behind the dress patterns, her chalks borrowed for silk, perhaps a petticoat beneath…?

Kowa blinks, at midnight.

It has no face when she fixes the last curl, lacking the talent to paint one; for the best, when a thousand-thousand watch in the dark. Not good enough to gift either, made from too ugly a place, too poor for children of baubles. 

for a second time you dry heave above the round of the world, your bile kept to a corner of the deck. this landing might be kinder, absent the choke of dalmascan sand, if not for glimpsed barrenness as the airship skims the mountain. never have you seen the pridelands, yet its scent is too familiar: stale, open-air despair. 

the gangplank drops, their language bandied through the snowfall, and you keep your glare contained as you rebuff men from your trunks. a stranger waits in the gray morning, permissive of their help; mother and son have brought too much from her cookfires for you not to place the lightning. she too knows you by legend. your nods are passing before she boards your escape.

you march the first steps - other grim interventions - before your memory recedes.

it is better up close: these wounded homes keep color, their hearths in patient waiting. the infirmary remains lit and past it looms your marked-off tent, its table blessedly sturdy. you drag out the dismantled wheel, building it past your bitterness, and you need - 

- interruption, of blonde, snow-sprayed fur.

she shifts like it pains her, like she has not let herself be small in suns. you make her with your hold, with your scruffing hand, annoying cat dragged through your chest until the rumble earns a smile. missing others is not your nature but you force the words up: she is not who taught you to say things for people, but she is the reason you do not forget.

sleep, commanded, and she outgrows your arms - can’t, any more than she can suffer personhood. and there glints the conviction that rules you, your only bleeding god: to not give her home to the rot that claimed yours, a blasphemy beyond teeth.

she shakes her coat free. you gather up the fur, hope in its aether, and set your wheel to work.