he is not he first person to have said these words to her. she has been read for filth before, completely stripped down by a single knowing gaze, even if they never understood what it was that they were unraveling. galatea never caved, never told them. it was her pain, her grief, all she had left of them beyond the memories and she was a hoarding dragon of a girl, wasn't she?
"i-" a hiccup of a sob wracks her small body. at some point she has managed to wiggle off of him, careless with the mess this makes, with what drips down her thighs and his alike. she twists in his arms and curls into him, presses her tear-soaked face into his warm chest.
it takes several long minutes for her sobbing to ebb into something she can form words around. there is still a deep, heavy sorrow there that weighs down the confession.
he is not the first to have said those words but he is the first she has ever told the truth to in return.
"i was married once. we were both from the same village.. my father and my mother held a place of authority. do you know why i am a bard? how i came to learn the stories of this realm?" she sucks in a sobering breath and curls an arm around his torso, almost possessive now that she is admitting this.
"because that was what my mother did, and her mother before her and her mother before her... on and on and on. our stories lived in us. we spoke them every night over great feasts, shared them at weddings and funerals. we did not have books the way you do, we had the words and they lived in the tellers, my mother was the last true teller. i was meant to be next ... but we were also a people that hid from the world. a past of too much pain and sorrow brought on from the rest of the realm kept us secreted away from those that would bring us more harm than good. i understood why, i know what great suffering our people went through, but it had been so long ago.
i was so certain we would be better off if we were careful, if we knew the right people and made the right bonds. there would be strength in that, surely. and though it meant i would be leaving my husband.. and our two.. our-" here her voice breaks and she has to stop, has to squeeze her eyes shut and work out the knot of panic rising in her chest.
"..my daughters. i left them, took the trust and faith of my people with what little we had to trade and traveled four times to four different cities. i came back with such grand tidings, with gifts and medicines and things we could use to flourish. i was to be a teller but oh, the new stories i could now sing.. and so i went for a fifth time."
her fingers curled inward, nails biting at his back. she didn't mean to hurt him, but there was so much in her overflowing, where could she put all this rage?
"and like all the times before i sold all i brought and knew i would come home and be allowed to make this a new tradition, be allowed to open ourselves to the greater world... but i fell into my cups that night.. and i ... i don't know who i spoke to, who heard me drunkenly wail about missing my girls.. it was my fault. i told them too much. i invited in the very devil we had been so careful to leave behind.
when i came home the village was mostly ash and cinder. there were only a few lucky souls that hid and survived. my mother.. father... husband.. my... my girls, my sweet girls, they were-"
the sobs come again, like a roaring tidal wave crashing into the fragile shore of her mind. she is a banshee that wails and mourns, "d-dead, all of them, and it was me, i led them there, i told them, i.. i killed them, gale, all of them!"
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
2087
vaporwave
