#bisect

[ 01 - 16 - 2025 ]

FFxivWrite2019 Prompt #20: Bisect Z, Since the day you died, half of me has gone with you. I wonder if you felt the same way on that first day I found you? Did you feel guilt to have been the only one to survive? Did you feel you failed them? Did you wish to trade your life for any of theirs? Your sister, perhaps? Why did you never mention her to me? I can’t be cross with you. There’s a lot I never had the chance to mention to you. But now you’re gone, and so to is a part of me, and buried with us are all the secrets we’d never shared with each other.

My father took more from me than just my hand. I suppose that’s the way it works, isn’t it? He took your life. Even though Aelius had given him all his love and loyalty, of what did he rob his eldest son? Dignity, happiness, his own identity? As much as I resent the man, I do pity him. And Atlas, who never even had the chance to meet our father? He was cheated out of his parents, cheated out of the knowledge of who he is and where he came from, cheated out of a childhood. Even young Valerius, who I’ve never met and hope I never shall, what has been stolen from him already? His father, his family? What a fate to befall so young a child, an at the hands of a father he will be too young to even recall.

Parents are supposed to give to their children. Why, then, did he only take? Why did he who was meant to nurture destroy all we held dear? I’ve often thought it was this blood in my veins that was cursed, but how then to explain your misfortune when we’d not a drop in common? Perhaps it was only a relation to Stanislas that held the curse. After all, his wives fared little better, one a widow grieving one child and raising another herself, the other dead at her husband’s hands--indirectly, or perhaps directly. If I ever bear children Can I still have children?

Character: Arshtat Ejinn Location: The Broken Horn, Mist Tags: Mention of @thrillofbattle

When he kissed her, she always fell apart. Her body gave way under his hands, his lips. He had learned every place of her, by heart. And she had learned all the pieces of him.

He took care to give attention to all of her. Sometimes it was a gentle thing, sometimes less so, but it was never without the both of them giving everything to each other. He favored her hips tonight, calloused fingers running along the edge where scale gave way to delicate skin.

The fingers always led the lips, the tongue. Warm and wet, he broke her apart along her stomach and up. There he met the scar, the scar that nearly bisected her body across the heart. His mouth would follow that too, always slowing, more careful, like he was making an offering upon a shrine.

And when he had given it enough, the trail led next up to her neck. She submitted as naturally as breathing. She knew him. Her body knew him. Two brought into one. 

The scents of old leather, herbs and the subtle sweetness of beeswax hung in the air as Sana entered her beloved work-space. Familiar to her, the scents were comforting and a welcome part of the little sanctuary A’sana had created for her work. They also acted to help separate her mind from the mundane, away from the life she had cultivated for herself that wasn’t part of the things she studied.