#bitchatcloudtower

There was nothing to do in Darkar’s cave. Anything interesting in the libraries had long since been exhausted, and neither Icy nor Stormy were feeling like entertaining her tonight; Icy wanted to be alone, and Darcy did not share Stormy’s penchant for tormenting the acolytes in increasingly cruel and unusual ways.

And so it was this boredom that led her to stick around when Darkar’s cultists started setting something up in the room she was haunting. These sick fucks used blood magic, a discipline that had been outlawed so long ago that she hadn’t been able to study it at all. There hadn’t even been anything on it in Cloud Tower’s secret library. Darcy’s ennui ran so deep that she felt a kind of morbid fascination even though she knew she shouldn’t.

So she stayed as they started marking the floor with their blood and lit those foul smelling candles. Up until this point, those mutilated freaks had ignored her but for the polite bow they always gave her in greeting, but now many of them were shooting her surprised and wary looks.

Eventually, a woman missing her nose and ears and with burn scars over much of her scalp approached her. She bowed to Darcy respectfully.

“Are you here to join the ritual?” The woman’s voice was distorted by her lack of nose and it repulsed Darcy.

“What is the ritual?”

“We are here to reach ecstasy.” If Darcy didn’t know better, she’d think this was a sex thing. But she’d spent enough time around these freaks to know that they didn’t have any interest in fucking - to the extent that Darcy and her sisters wondered how Darkar maintained his number of acoluytes.

“I am interested.” Blood magic was not something she would get the opportunity to witness often.

“We will only take a little of your blood for the first time.” Darcy found her hand tugged into the woman’s and a pin pressed into the pad of her ring finger.

A bead of blood welled up out of the small injury, and the woman turned her finger over so that the drop gave in to gravity and splashed onto the floor between the markings.

At first, nothing happened. Darcy was just standing in the middle of a blood and cultist circle, waiting for something to change, but nothing did. She began to wonder if she hadn’t been bled enough for this.

And then her vision clouded at the edges. Her legs gave way and she found herself on the ground, although she barely felt the impact. Her body was numb but for the dull, pulsing pain in her ring finger. Her muscles started to seize and Darcy had to wonder what the fuck they meant by ‘ecstacy’, because this wasn’t it.

Strong, familiar hands grabbed her shoulders and pulled her into a sitting position. She rubbed the clouding from her eyes and stared, shocked, into the comforting dark eyes of her ex-boyfriend.

Riven looked disgruntled, as always. His hair was messy this morning and his brow was furrowed as he stared at her, but his touch was gentle. Fingers gently traced her jaw until she stopped looking about her in confusion; Pretty off-white walls, morning light coming in through east facing windows, clean bedsheets. Riven was here with her, exactly as it should be. The feel of his breath on her face grounded her instantly.

“You were making noise in your sleep.” He grumbled, although his eyes softened; he had been worried although he hadn’t wanted to show it.

Darcy didn’t say anything back to him. She didn’t tell him anything about her awful dream, how she’d hated being that age and how her subconscious mind was still taunting her with it after all these years. Instead she sat up and swung her legs out of bed, her feet making contact with the soft woollen rug on the floor of the bedroom. Their bedroom. In their home. Something still felt wrong, but she chalked it up to bad sleep.

“It’s still early, you don’t have to get up right away,” he called after her, and Darcy paused. She didn’t want to leave him.

“And if I come to bed, what will I get from it?”

Riven’s eyes widened, un-creasing the bare hints of wrinkles that were just starting to come in. His face lost its hard lines and jagged edges as he let out a breath. He no longer looked fierce and serious, but instead his soft and sweet expression made Darcy consider that he was adorable. Like a puppy dog. So cute that she wanted to hold and squash and kill until he wasn’t cute anymore. He made her feel safe and comforted and she wanted to ruin that.

He lay back down in bed and she joined him, climbing on top of him, and running her hands over his still well-toned bare chest. Even after all this time together, years, jobs, moving house, she still found him as attractive as she had when they’d first met.

Riven looked up at her and released the tension in his body. When they were together like this, she was in total control.

Her nails raked down his chest, leaving red welts behind and he let out a gasp before reaching up to gently touch her face. He might not like to say it often, but Riven loved her. And Darcy loved him. She corrupted everything she touched, but he had never left her. She curled her fingers, digging her nails into his skin and drawing blood. She gave him her pain, her viciousness, her bitterness and he turned it into love.

His hand moved past her cheek to her hair and she couldn’t help but lean into it. What would she do without him? That thought made her heart hurt to look at him.

The soft morning light that filled her home with Riven began to fade away. The feel of his body beneath her slipping away too. This wasn’t real, none of it was. Here there was no Icy and Stormy, there had been no attack on Magix, no arrow through her shoulder.

“I miss you,” she whispered, and her vision clouded once more and all she could feel was the cold rock of Darkar’s castle.

She was gasping for breath and there were tears on her face. Darcy wanted to sit up, to get up and leave, but her body felt like lead. She had come around faster than the others in the room, but she could hear them weeping.

She hadn’t realised how much detail she could remember about him. Enough that she had been able to imagine him how he would look years from now - the weathering of his skin, the roughness of his hands from years of training, how his hair had darkened over time, and his jaw had filled out. How he would look if she hadn’t taken what they had and destroyed it, how he would look if she'd never met Icy or Stormy.

The tears wouldn’t stop no matter how hard she tried to force them to stay in her eyes. This was all her fault and there was nothing that she could do about it. Darcy clutched her chest, willing her heart to slow. To stop.

Bitterly, she realised what it was the cultists had meant by ‘ecstasy’. She felt it coursing through her veins, permeating every part of her body and causing her to pull on her hair until strands came away in her fingers. It was despair. The complete lack of hope. That future with Riven, a future she hadn’t realised that she desperately wanted, was never going to happen. Nothing she did was going to change that.