The word was a hand wrapped around her wrist, dragging her back into the treacherously soft bed despite her best efforts. The hand wrapped around her wrist also pulled her back in. Zenos’s warm palms were good at coaxing her into forgetting why she rose in the first place.
He wound his arms around her and laid his mouth to the soft rise of her breast where the unlaced neck of her blouse left it bare.
“Forget the call.” With each new word, the Garlean prince’s words smeared against her skin. “Feign poor weather as opposed to your utter disinterest.”
“I’m not…”
Annette’s chop of brown hair intermingled with his blond as she tilted her head down against his, her fingers climbing up his throat to rest at the nape of his long, love-marred neck. He reacted as prettily as he always did, with an arch and a sigh and a much-needed stretch. Quietly, she assured him, “I’m not disinterested. They are my friends, and I must go to them. Now.”
Friends that were awaiting her in Kugane. Friends who did not know of the bed she’d been pulled back into. They needed her, but the thought of riding her chocobo after the previous night’s exertions made her thighs ache.
She pressed a kiss to the top of his head, where his golden hair split to bare a sun-burned scalp.
“I must leave,” she whispered. “Soon.”
Zenos smiled without lifting his mouth from her chest, like the cat that got the cream.
“Oh, how quickly now becomes soon,” he said, his voice caught between a low rumble and a hum. The hand that had dragged her back down into bed slid over her back, over the generous swell of her ass, and to those aching thighs. “When will it become tomorrow? Or, perhaps… never?”
“Never,” Annette echoed, her brows arched and point made. “Soon will remain soon.”
They fell back onto the pillows with a huff and a laugh, knowing well that they would spend another night lost in each other.
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prompt: cross • words: 1,019 • era: childhood • [ masterpost ]
go or extend across or to the other side of (a path, road, stretch of water, or area).
A smattering of footfalls slipped through the crack beneath the door leading into Louisoix Leveilleur’s library from the hallway outside. He could tell the two of them apart by gait alone. Annette walked on the balls of her feet most of the time, turning her eager scamper into gentle thump thumps as she ran up the stairwell and made a break for his office. Olivier was quieter still — and slower by more than half, never taking more steps than was utterly necessary. When he did, the sound manifested itself as an unsure murmur of tap, tap, tap.
He heard their approach long before the two students stopped right in front of the very door that gave them both away. The doorknob twisted, but did not open.
“Are you sure about this?” Olivier’s muffled voice was pointed and wearier than any twelve-year-old had any right to sound. “We shouldn’t bother him with our stupid questions. We should just ask someone else.”
“No one else gives such good answers!”
Louisoix tapped the point of his pen against the lip of his ink well, smiling to himself. His mind’s eye could picture the young students out in the dimly lit hallway down to the finest of details. This was not the first time this had happened.
“But… if the question is stupid, the answers will be stupid regardless of who we ask.”
He could just imagine Annette puffing her cheeks out, just as he could imagine Olivier’s sudden slouch and the roll of his eyes. The two were nothing if not predictable, right down to the flush of the former’s cheeks.
“There are no stupid questions!” Annette shouted, indignant, as Louisoix mouthed the words he so often said to the students closest to him. They all required the reminder. If anyone was going to make sure that lesson was committed to memory, it might as well have been him. “Only foolish people who refuse to ask for help!”
Olivier sighed.
How a child’s sigh could be heard through two inches of solid wood, he hardly knew. The boy had a way about him, as if he had experienced all that the world could give him and was still somewhat unimpressed. Louisoix knew that it was only his temperament and not how he truly felt, but many teachers had voiced their frustration with Olivier’s condescending nature to him in private.
Not that such a thing amounted to any sort of action.
Punishing a young man for his personality was the surest way to muzzle him.
The door flung open.
Annette tried to stop it from slamming into the nearby bookshelf, but didn’t quite manage with her short arms and floundering strength. She winced when the impact rattled between her ears. She was only ever stopped momentarily, however, and before long, she was pushing one of the room’s chairs closer to the front of his grand desk, the legs howling against the tiled floors.
Kneeling on the pale blue cushion, Annette grunted as she hauled herself up. “Master Louisoix, Olivier and I have been wondering—”
“I would appreciate it if you did not pull me into this,” Olivier said through gritted teeth as he joined her. The differences between them couldn’t have been more obvious than they were in that moment, as Olivier lifted the chair he’d chosen rather than dragging it across the floor and leaving the woolen rug in the center of the room bunched in places and pitifully askew. “I have not been wondering anything.”
Annette pinched her lips together in an anxious pout, but again, only for a moment. Once she decided not to be upset by something, you could see her take it in both hands and push it away.
“An-anyway…!”
“What is it that you were wondering about, Annette?”
Appreciation dawned over her round face. The same could be said about Olivier’s, as his eyes lit up behind their squeaky clean, gold-framed lenses. Encouraging both children could be so easily managed with a little grace. You need only acknowledge them both.
Few of his fellow scholars understood that it was possible. Allowing one of them to be hurt in favor of lifting up their fellow was the sort of clumsy teaching that he often warned his compatriots against.
Not that they ever listened.
Annette leaned forward, her feet swishing above the ground. “Is the Bloodbrine Sea actually red?”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Louisoix saw Olivier shrink back an inch as his expression shifted into an embarrassed pucker. He was the sort of student who hated listening to others talk, even when that person was his closest friend. Ridiculousness plagued him.
Which was why Louisoix responded with great relish.
“Actually,” he began, resting his pen down on the tray beside his inkwell and folding his hands on top of the desk, “there are vast swaths of Bloodbrine that do turn a rich red color in the warmer months.”
Olivier’s mouth fell open. “Really?”
“Really.”
Both of the students scooted closer to the edge of their seats, wrapped in equal parts of interest and disbelief. He took great pride in encouraging Olivier to allow himself to feel awed; such an emotion was rare among the cleverest of the children.
“There is a specific type of algae that turns the water blood red in the summertime,” he continued. “Hence, the name.”
“I knew it!” Annette cheered. She twisted around to look at Olivier, her doe-brown eyes squinting in a smile. To her credit, she did not mock him. She simply leaned against the arm of the chair, leaning even closer to her friend. “One day, we have to sail across the Bloodbrine to see all of the red water!” She flopped back into her chair, the smile on her face softening as the feeling of being right swam over her skin. “Oh, I bet it’s lovely to look at.”
Louisoix had only crossed the Bloodbrine Sea a few times before and always in winter.
He hoped that whenever his students sailed south, he could go with them.
prompt: temper • words: 1,045 • era: stormblood • [ masterpost ]
to dilute, qualify, or soften by the addition or influence of something else
The true tone of her voice waylaid expectations built upon the bricks of longing.
Where Zenos anticipated the soft brush of silk, there was the ache of gravel under a heavy palm. Where he anticipated honey, there was instead the coarseness of sugar. Her words neither melted nor purred, but plummeted down into the very pit of his stomach and remained there, heavy as rocks.
Annette Eilhart was question after question.
When first they met, the Warrior of Light had not the words to speak to him. The fabric of her throat had likely been torn to bloody shreds on the approach, shouting orders that were stolen away by an ashen breeze. Her words had been weathered to nothing by the grief and determination that he saw so clearly upon her small, soft-cheeked face during their first confrontation.
The awe she felt upon coming to blows with him quieted her, Zenos thought initially.
In the interim, however, he found himself thinking. Reconsidering. Wondering.
For there was an element of wonder involved in turned memory upon memory over behind his eyes. His mind afforded him no small amount of musing in the quiet hours. Even as the rank and file droned on about their own desperate, fruitless campaigns, he reached for the bright and muddied half-paintings that his imagination offered up in supplication to his ridiculous fascination.
They were not daydreams. They were madness.
They were his.
When she reached out to him, he felt the pressure of her touch at the apple of his throat. When her mouth moved, he heard her voice curl between his ears like smoke. Sunlight flickered over her skin as if it poured down upon her through leaves no matter the absence of trees overhead. And the color in her eyes was ever-changing. Gold became rich brown became black.
She was a weak thing made of fire and wind, but behind the set of her brow was stone. She was a creature born of nature, just as he had been built with smoke and steel. The contrasts between them were intoxicating. They left him curious and frustrated and eager.
Boredom bordering upon indolence became a thing of the past as she wound herself around his mind, suffocating what remained of the aimless prince that had grown so stale in recent years.
Zenos felt himself change as a creature did upon shedding its skin. He felt himself froth, teeth bloodied by the gnashing.
He felt the Warrior of Light settle into his bones. What was once curiosity became marrow.
She even followed him into his dreams. She crept into whatever scant few hours he allowed himself. Even in the dark, she glowed like an ember and sent shadows three times her size sprawling against the walls in every direction. Anyone else might have been afraid of how they felt, of what they saw of her, but Zenos stared into the dark and the light and did not blink.
In her presence and in the pitch black of night, he smiled to himself. He listened to the voice he’d never heard, allowing the sound to curl around his wrists and ankles and throat like tender bindings. He swallowed the sound of her — not just the voice he’d given her, but the smooth rustle of her clothes and the crackle of a hungry fire. Every sweetly spoken threat she laid at his feet, he devoured without hesitation.
In the lonely night, Zenos consumed her, and his stomach burned for it.
Only when their paths crossed again did he realize just how incorrect he had been. In a moment, the Warrior of Light had turned him from a monster to a foolish boy with teeth too big for his mouth. The fury that incensed inside of him did not have an end.
But they were his daydreams. They were images and whispers of sound conjured up by a mind yearning for connection.
All around them, the sky wept onto Gyr Abanian sands. The air thickened in the heat and the rain, just as the ground beneath their feet threatened to sink. And they — alone, soaked through to their skin — stared across at each other. Their retinues had either fallen behind or been abandoned entirely, leaving one vulnerable and the other set loose.
Zenos did not know which of them he laid claim to.
She said his name just as thunder rolled overhead. In some cruel joke, the sound did not reach him, but the shape her mouth made around the word would cling to him like sopping cloth to skin.
Rage climbed up from his belly. It made a ladder of his spine; it pried open his mouth and freed itself in the twisted shape of a laugh. Even to his ears, the bitterness of it sounded foreign among the whisper-soft fall of rain, like a keening blade among a choir.
But what was he, if not a sharpened edge?
“I could not have asked for better stage dressing,” Zenos began. With the hand not poised on the hilt of the Swell, he cut through the swollen air with a gesture. “Unfortunately, your imminent second defeat will only be seen by the realm you seek to protect.”
Their onlookers were made of stone and sun-bleached grasses, whose rousing support would sound like the susurrus of wind, the strident cry of lightning, and the ponderous rattling of the thunder that followed. Sunlight bled down onto their makeshift arena, as if its golden fingers of light stretched to reach her even in the middle a storm.
His heart galloped in his chest. Its pace was nigh impossible to match.
When he looked at her, he saw that her eyes were golden. Her soft-bodied shadow cowered beneath the shape of his own. The rainfall made the fire in her spit and shrink until the light of it went out entirely.
“You look as if you have something pathetic to say.”
Her lips parted, then shut.
“Don’t do this,” Annette spoke, her voice barely escaping the tightened clench of her throat. “Please.”
The madness she inspired in him was tempered with a handful of words.
It left behind the grit of sugar on his lips, and it easily melted in the rain.
prompt: channel • words: 755 • era: endwalker • [ masterpost ]
cause to pass along or through a specified route or medium.
Following their return from the Thirteenth, the party’s reserves were tattered and threadbare.
No one had the aether to spare, even in hopes of returning Zero to full lucidity. They were forced to stand idly by while she slept, her chest rising and falling as evenly as anything beneath the dark layers of her armor. Each of them carried a curiosity in themselves that was impossible to deny. Their questions were different, but the answers would sound the same in Zero’s haltingly quiet voice.
What will you give me?
How much does this question mean to you?
The constant transactions left Annette on edge, where Olivier and Y’shtola both seemed to understand and even sympathize with her manner of action.
Or, perhaps, it wasn’t Zero and her manner of discussion that had hauled her to a precipice to stand between relief and fury. Her frustration was just love, differently shaped, as Zenos’s crystal weighed down the pack she carried with her. It sat upon her lap, and through the worn leather, she could feel the heat emanating from the pale purple object.
Maybe she still held the aether Zero required inside of her. Maybe it was sequestered away somewhere deep.
For him, she could find it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Olivier said, his whisper interrupting her thoughts and giving her quite the start. “What you currently lack in aether, you make up for in absurdity, I swear.”
Annette’s back snapped into something pin-straight.
“I’m fine.”
He laughed at her. What a prick.
“I understand how you feel about him. Trust me, I do.” Olivier set a long-fingered hand lightly upon her shoulder before giving the sore muscle a much-needed squeeze. “But he did offer you up on a silver platter for a voidsent. Without your permission.”
How could she tell Olivier that she did not mind without coming off as some brainless, love drunk fool?
Not that she wasn’t one, she supposed.
“Desperate times,” was all Annette said, her broad shoulders bobbing in a noncommittal shrug.
He saved my life, she could not quite open her mouth to say. It didn’t matter if Olivier knew the truth; she wanted to say it again. Over and over, until her lips split. He saved all of Eorzea in that moment. And when I could not return the favor by saving him, rather than dying at the very edge of the universe, he reached out to Zero with one last request — and the offer of a colossal amount of aether as payment.
His actions were not mean-spirited. They were a spark, an impulse on quick feet. Death sought to claim him, and his only desire was to seem himself into her hands once again.
Now, he was no more than an amethyst glow inside of a crystal.
Trapped, but hers.
“If I give her what is left that I can spare in order to resuscitate her,” Annette continued, “then perhaps she will require less of my aether in payment.”
In Olivier’s eyes, she saw a shade of concern. But after years upon years of living alongside each other, he knew better than anyone that Annette was intimately aware of her limits. There were few that remained, but those that did were explicitly documented for the safety of the world around them.
So, that concern he wore on his narrowed features found no voice.
“Please make sure I have something to eat once I’m finished.” She stood from the chair beside the bed Zero had been laid out on upon their arrival in Radz-at-Han, her pack still clutched in her hands. She had scarcely let it go more than a few times since receiving the crystal from Zero. “I will need your help in getting to the table.”
Olivier lingered at the bedside, but only for a moment.
Annette knew what she was doing. She had to after all they had done. In her eyes, the risk was worth taking.
Settling down onto the bed beside the prone voidsent, she took the woman’s hand only to find that her near-translucent skin was cool to the touch. It stood in stark opposition to her own, which was flushed from the heat.
“I will not give you everything,” Annette said, her voice a careful whisper that she knew Zero could not hear. “But I will give you enough.”
The deal had been struck by another…
… but she would channel her all into its repayment.
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prompt: confluence • words: 476 • era: shadowbringers • [ masterpost ]
an act or process of merging.
The sea of black and blue that swirled in every direction around her was dotted with glittering shards of memory.
The light that shone ahead caught their sharpened edges, and they glinted like glass under the midday sun, bringing a small amount of warmth to the interminable chill. Only for a time did the warmth linger, as memories tumbled past her in the shape of familiar faces. Tataru beamed at her, one of her small hands lifted into a wave that turned into an encouraging salute. She saw Urianger’s curious expression against a backdrop of beige stone that she recognized as Minfilia’s office. Behind him, at a distance, she saw a flash of familiar silver hair and heard a bright and boisterous laugh that made her heart tumble down into her belly.
Alphinaud and Alisaie floated alongside each other, coaxing her forward as they always had. Behind them, Thancred looked away, the slip of his memory shadowed. Y’shtola and Krile soared past, along with faces that left her heart aching.
Haurchefant.
Louisoix.
Between all of her comrades and the occasional companion, she caught glimpses of the places she’d visited across Hydaelyn. She saw Gridania, Ishgard, Ala Mhigo. She saw home with its white brick and its glittering blue harbor.
She saw a fireplace and a cup of hot chocolate. She saw the gleaming Gold Saucer.
But among all of the shards of glass, among all the well-kept memories, one stood out to her on the horizon. It first revealed itself with a flutter of golden hair, replaced with a bloodthirsty blue gaze. Beneath the delicate point of his chin dripped blood that glittered in shades of ruby red. Fire consumed Zenos’s face, turning his hair into tattered battle standards.
He stood above her weary body in shape alone, and when his lips parted, she could still hear Elidibus’s choice of words.
Annette pivoted as best she could, twisting around to instead glare out into nothingness.
The nothingness was warmer than the shade of her lover that she’d left behind. It welcomed her as she floated towards something distant and unknown.
Was this what the other Scions had seen once their souls abandoned their bodies? Had they floated endlessly between words, haunted by their various pasts? Had Alphinaud seen Ilberd? Had Urianger seen Moenbryda?
Had Thancred seen Minfilia?
Tears sparkled at the corners of her eyes.
Roads were paved with her mistakes. Mountains, carved from the earth by her failures. And all around her, stretching in every direction, were countless individuals who still looked to her as if she hung the sun in the sky.
She longed for darkness after the years of squinting into that very sun and making sharp-edged memories. But where she was going, she would not find it.
Still, even the exhausting light of an endless day would be preferable to being haunted.
prompt: bolt • words: 1,100 • era: a realm reborn • [ masterpost ]
a jagged white flash of lightning.
I tire of being forced to prove myself.
Annette tilted her chin upward, her eyes blackened by the roiling pitch of night. She stood rooted into the ground by the worn soles of her boots, shimmering water licking at the leather with every whisper of wind that darted between the trees in hopes to cross their makeshift arena.
All around her, the forest bent beneath the primal’s twisted will. Silver-barked tree trunks bowed in reverence to their lord, their heavy boughs humbled and half-buried in ground. Boulders that had been swallowed by the earth for longer than she could possibly know lifted themselves from the dirt to craft the clearing themselves. The lightest of the stones did not only move aside. They rose into the air, held aloft with magics that gave off arcs of purple light whenever they drew close to each other.
The world itself rose beneath Ramuh’s feet, creating a hillock in the very center of the glade. His massive form responded to this sign of favor by searing the grass with the flickering tendrils of lightning that fell away from him in crackling waves.
Hidden by the branches of their upturned forest were the sylphs in their richly colored livery. The blinding cracks of lightning that preceding every thunderous roll of the storm clouds above illuminated their heart-shaped faces.
Even from a distance, Annette could see the awed expressions they wore.
Desperation drove them, as it drove all things. Desperation and fear and a lack of protection. The Sylphs were no different from any other creature in their longing for safety. Despite their fiendish desires and the cursed, perverted state of the forest around them, she could not fault them for finding solace in a creature so capable of violence.
After all, how was she any different?
The men and women of Eorzea tossed her out as a fishermen might throw a great, hand-woven net across the water.
And in that net, they sought to capture every threat that sought to harm them and every harmful thing that sought to kill them. In that net, they wanted to see their enemies drowned. In that net, they saw retribution and justice and a bloodied amends for all that befell them.
She allowed it solely because she knew that she was capable.
“There will always be another threat to take to task.” She could recall Olivier’s words to the letter, each of them ringing through her weary head following her rare complaint on the road to Gridania. He sat beneath the carriage’s canopy with a lit pipe in his hand, flecks of sun dancing along the arm that he stretched over the back of his seat. “There will always be another trial for us to overcome.”
I tire of trials.
Staring into the face of someone’s god and knowing how to end them was humbling in and of itself. Not just anyone could lay their hands upon a god and walk away relatively unscathed. Only someone as powerful — or, perhaps, more powerful — could bring them down.
What did that make her?
Was she a tool to be used, or was she a god?
Ramuh loomed in front of and above her. Fingers of an ozone-scented breeze rustled through the voluminous beard that stretched from his chin down to his knees, and above the pour of white hair was a pair of piercing eyes in pure, bloody red.
“Am I to believe the state of the Shroud has naught to do with you, Hero?”
The word was shaped strangely in his mouth. It sounded a curse where she was accustomed to hearing it used as a rallying cry. But as the sharpened use of Hero hit its mark, Annette did not flinch.
She did not even look away.
What he said was not true. In his eyes, one hyur looked like all others. In his eyes, a plague was a plague was a plague. Every spare hand was another lit match in a forest of tinder.
“Place blame where you will,” Annette said, her voice rising up like a wave meant to drown out the sound of the storm that clattered around them both. “But I require your help irregardless of the root cause. You will give it to me, will you not? If I manage to prove myself to you?”
The primal laughed.
I tire of staring into the eyes of these creatures and being told I cannot or should not or will not.
The sound of a snapped whip resounded at her back, and a flood of pure white light followed in an instant to illuminate Annette where she stood. Lightning slammed into the ground mere feet away, sending up a tornado of dirt that whirled through the already dense air. Every breath smelled like burning, tasted like dirt and dew and ash.
Adrenaline surged down to her tingling fingertips.
He wanted to fight her; she could see as much written on his face. He yearned to knock her down, to humble her as others should have long before. Alas, a miniature inferno floated at her side.
Ego born of incredible power was what made it so simple for Ramuh to believe he would not be the one humbled.
“Searching for an ally amongst the forest?” he asked. His voice rose above the crescendo of the storm without issue. Thunder quieted to hear the words that slipped from his lips. The wind ceased its howling and instead curled sinuously through the fabric of his robes. “What will you do with my strength, should you win?”
Annette’s hand fell to her side, unbuckling the tome that grimoire strapped to her hip, and Ifrit curled its flaming claws in preparation, in eagerness.
Inside of the book, there were spells beyond counting, each of them scribbled down during wildly different times in her life. Some had been scrawled in a child’s hand, on pages fringed with burnt ripples or swollen with water long since gone dry. Other, more recent spells were penned carefully, with notes from Olivier and other Scions in the margins.
Lessons were learned with time. Trials, overcome.
In the absence of her response, the storm rose up again. Thunder rolled between her ears. Lightning crashed, splintering wood, summoning up a spit of fire among the darkened trees.
She did the same, a flame flaring bright in the palm of her hand.
I tire of speaking. I tire of diplomacy. I tire of you and your condescending words and the weakness you seek to bury down deep beside the fear.
prompt: attrition • words: 1,227 • era: stormblood • [ masterpost ]
the action or process of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of someone or something through sustained attack or pressure.
She could not beat him, but she could withstand his attacks.
The concept of a stalemate left Zenos little more than a slavering beast, one chained by limits that had never before claimed him.
He stared across the rain-churned mud of their battlefield at the Warrior of Light, only barely visible through sheets of pouring rain. And in that rain — through that rain — he saw the powerful light of her grimoire. Flames untouched by the storm licked over the spine and the pages, pouring up her wrist without burning her or setting the fabric of her robes alight.
Yanxia smelled of fresh air and rainfall, of fields and paddies, of fresh fruits and flowers ripening, but he could barely fill his lungs between each attack. They ached. The sensation was as sweet as it was foreign and infuriating.
Zenos sucked in a sharp breath, lowering himself to the ground in an elegant arch that belied the searing heat that pushed through his muscles. That very breath tasted like iron — not from a wound or a bloodied nose, but from a bitten cheek, his molars grinding as he prepared to launch forward in Annette’s direction.
She did not smell like blood or rainfall, even with water soaking through the long locks of her hair. He knew what she smelled like.
The Warrior of Light smelled of ozone, of clove, of sweat, and every breath he took was full of her, as if his nose was buried into the hair just behind her ear.
Zenos surged forward with a growl. The Swell crackled with energy, arcs of wind energy slipping away from the katana’s massive blade in pale green ribbons. Rain never touched the metal, no matter how heavily the sky poured it forth. Instead, the droplets were flung away with the power of the sword.
The blade never touched Annette, either.
When the Garlean prince swung the Swell aided by the forward momentum of his body, the sharpened edge glanced off of a pillar of rock, thrown up from the muddied ground by the shadow of yet another primal.
Zenos threw his weight into another blow without missing a beat, cleaving the stone in two with a snarl that was drowned in a roll of thunder.
Rubble blasted into the distance, cracking through the thin glass windows of nearby houses and burying deep into the wooden slats of the same structures. What remained of the boulder collapsed into inert stones, with Annette nowhere to be found.
A rain-soaked lock of gold fell in front of one of Zenos’s eyes.
But nothing could conceal the almost delirious pleasure the man took from being outmaneuvered. He wore it plainly on his face — a joyful mask tied in place to cover the dour, unimpressed mien of someone with no equal. He did not have teeth sharpened into fangs, but his smile looked as if it could break skin without trying.
“Face me,” Zenos murmured. He turned, mud squishing around his greaves as he pivoted in the Warrior of Light’s direction. The rain slackened, droplets clinging to his brow and lashes and the long, curved tip of his nose. “Cast your cowardice aside.”
“Why do you consider this cowardice?”
His lips parted. Another droplet flung itself from his nose.
“Your ceaseless running is why I refer to this pathetic tactic of yours as cowardice.” Zenos lowered the Swell to his side. The wind picked up from the blade, sending ripples of mud away from its tip in waves. “Stand against me.”
Annette tilted her chin upward.
She was a stubborn woman. Time had shared with him that truth.
“Fine.”
Ah, she relents, came a whisper in Zenos’s mind. His heart thumped wildly in his ears, in his chest, in the wound he’d bitten into his cheek. This will be an execution. No more.
A newly discovered energy tore through him.
Zenos abandoned all previous efforts in favor of wielding fresh strength in the face of his greatest enemy. Adrenaline served as a constant companion, as familiar to him as his own reflection. He bit down; he bolted forward, sliding the Swell into the revolver that hung at his hip in favor of the most familiar of his blades. It bore the sigil of Garlemald rather than elemental magics.
The attachments he held to his homeland were the strings his father insisted on keeping tethered to his joints and nothing more.
But the blade’s weight was one he’d become well-acquainted with.
Plunging into the storm anew, Zenos’s hair flew back away from his face and the Garlean blade pierced through the air with a terrifying whistle. His prey did not move. She did not run or duck or plead with him to stop.
She stood. His blade was held at the perfect height to skewer her through the very center of her chest.
Tense moments before the tip found its home between her breasts, she fell into action.
With a clap of her grimoire and an upward thrust of her arms, Annette did not summon a barricade of stone, but a whirling colonnade of flame. The weeping storm sizzled and spat, sending up a thick fog of steam that blurred the details of her face…
… of her location.
Zenos dug his heels into the mud.
A glimmer of yellow-green shone from within the curtain of steam, and before Zenos could take a moment to decipher Annette’s next move, the summoned primal beat her slender wings and sent the pillar of flame flying forward. Garuda’s howl was not unlike the whistle of an inclement tornado. His ears buzzed from both the rattling cry and the sudden change of pressure all around them.
He leapt backwards, one foot sliding farther than the other and forcing him down onto his knee.
The fiery whirlwind changed directions like no true storm could, surging forward onto the very spot he’d stopped to catch his breath. He gathered his heavy weight onto legs that could still carry him, and he weaved around her attack as nimbly as he could manage, again and again and again until the fire was naught but a sinuous, sulfurous steam.
The weariness he’d beaten away with the excitement of a true fight returned with a vengeance. His shoulders sagged forward as he struggled to suck in a deep enough breath. Fury left his fingertips numb, his eyes bleary in the smoke.
She could not beat him, but she could withstand him.
And once she did, the elements could finally tear him to pieces, if he allowed it.
“Get this over with,” Zenos growled, tattered by the wind, tattered by the woman who stood wearily before him. “Kill me. Is that how this bout of dramatics is meant to end?”
On Annette’s face, she did not wear her anger. She did not wield guilt or pettiness like a blade. She simply stared at him, and her expression softened.
“You will not have the fight you so desperately want,” she said. He could see the tension that lingered in her broad shoulders, just as he could see the tired sag around her eyes. Their battle would not be glorious. It would be long and pathetic and stained with mud. Neither of them wanted that. “Not today.”
Zenos exhaled. Inhaled.
All he could smell was her, even on the rain, even yards apart.
