[ATTENTION]: during an important conversation, the sender takes the receiver's face in their hands and firmly directs their focus on them.
After a certain point, the drowning roar of flames became white noise, background and unimportant to the singular point of focus before him, the pinpricks of light that let him know his quarry still yet lived, had not yet succumbed to a pile the same pile of char as all of the magnificent lumber that had crumbled to ash in the enduring, unfathomable heat.
She thought she made a pretty sight, that witch, enveloping the room in a dense cloak of intense red, scorching and groaning fire crawling forward and leaving black and blood in its wake, her cackles the undercurrent of a beating heart under all that power.
He had felt the rumble in his chest, that cautious stir, the ichor cracking one eye open before slinking through his veins, and then he showed her what hellfire truly looked like.
Everything smeared to ash under his bootsteps, tatami mat and pine beams fizzling and creaking and groaning around him in curls of smoke that filled the air with sparking motes and smoke, and when he reached the crumpled witch he knelt, tucked a clawed hand under her chin and ushered her face upward so that he could see what remained of the twin flames in her eyes before his hands came up to frame her face, palms pressed, searing, burning to her cheeks -
And he squeezed.
â REASONS TO CUP A FACE.
Only fools would believe it hurt her still.
No, the heat had long since ceased to be a pain. To Rosalyneâto the Crimson witchâit was the closest thing to a loverâs embrace to her now, a molten kiss of ruin that curled around her every bone, whispering promises of oblivion, of rest at last, after years upon years of her vile existence. Red crept up her flesh, her veins rivers of liquid fireâyet she did not scream. Not anymore.
Rosalyne had screamed enough in her lifetime.
They were not so different, she and he. The man before her was a storm of ember and wrath, his flames devouring everything with a hunger that nearly mirrored her own. But where hers had been fires of grief, his was the inferno of decimation, unbiased as to who or what his flames might eat. How amusing that he thought his fire could frighten her. As if she had not let herself be devoured by her own flames, carved a home in the heart of the devastation it left behind. As if she had not cradled her own dying breaths in a cocoon of flame and named it rebirth.
His hands framed her face, searing, brandingâyet she felt nothing. Or perhaps she felt everything, the numbness of a body long since surrendered to the blaze. She met his gaze and smiled. A broken, weary thing, cracked at the edges like the charred remains of her lips.
âGo on then,â she wanted to say. âBurn me. Reduce me to cinders. I have already burned a thousand times before.â
But words were ash in her throat, so she laughed instead, liquid flames trickling from the corner of her eyes, marring already scarred cheeks as the sound of her laughter crackled like crumbling timber.
Her cryo delusion lay somewhere in the wreckage, buried underneath all the ruins they had left behind, and oh, how her heart of molten lava ached for it so. How it wished for the numbing embrace of frost to still the fire in her chest. But no. Rosalyne was done hiding. She was done freezing her heart into something palatable, something survivable just so she could yet walk on this wretched land.
Right. The Crimson Witch had grown tired of surviving.
So when his hold only tightened, when her attention is drawn to the searing press of his palm against her skin, she did not flinch. Did not beg.
No, rather, she commanded.
For her flames to soar to life one final time, spending whatever is left of her as fuelânot in defence, not in defiance, but in a final invitation. Let the fire take them both. Let the inferno they had birthed between them be their pyre, grave, and last fleeting dance.
And as the world dissolved into white-hot silence, Rosalyne laughed, and laughed, and laughedâuntil even her voice was nothing but embers on the wind.
The heat had long since ceased to be a pain to the Crimson Witch.
How fitting, then, that she succumbed to it like a lover.
