what cassandra must have known.
❪ ⠀herald / axe+ ⠀❫
WINTER HAD COME AGAIN. 𑣲 and with it came the old foreboding, the return of nightmares, the ache at the dead center of her breastbone. years before, when it'd all gotten particularly bad once——robbing her of sleep, of focus, even of her grades which had frightened her more than anything——she'd gone to the infirmary once or twice: what if the injury was truly still there and had never healed? what if she was sick? something had to be wrong with her. but examinations had revealed little ; it didn't even hurt when they pressed on the exact site where she could still recall being pierced by tines as solid as spearheads.
all they had done was tell her that many individuals struggled with seasonal low moods such as hers and it would brighten again come spring, then send her back to the dorm with a few bottles of an herbal concoction meant to settle her nerves. and all that'd accomplished was making her room smell like chamomile, lavender, and root for several weeks.
today, she still feared falling asleep. she still struggled with a looming and inexorable dread that came with the onset of overcast frost and settled like it over her as rime and wind did across the mountaintop, as though each time she looked up and around at the world, shadows stretched out from everyone and everything, blotting out the colors and the sun and the sky——the cold wasn't just a thermal sensation on the skin, but deeper and beyond physical ; it sat in the soul and grew there, put down roots. stayed permanently.
yet, she couldn't bring herself to tell the clerics that she knew they were wrong, that yes, this would lift with the spring, but that didn't mean it was about winter. it was irregardless of season, moored forever in that feeling that she knew was coming as soon as word of this offshore isle's festival preparation had begun to spread ; that her heart——her body——knew that she was going to die. what fix was there for that?
there were only two people who she knew could understand.
one of them, a gallant red knight of lycia, wasn't here anymore. it was hard not to feel relieved for him and envious all the same.
and the other. . .
the sound of approaching footsteps pulls her from her thoughts and her eyes from the floor. she'd been waiting half an hour, nothing to lose herself in but her thoughts, and is about to remark on how the work on the replica of gradivus had been done so fast, but the blacksmith isn't who emerges from the interior of the shop, rather a face and figure too familiar, whose presence posed a knife on tender wounds unhealed. her breath stops in her chest, and it's everything she can do to pull her eyes away and back to the grooves in the weathered stone——hoping vainly, maybe, that if he hadn't realized she'd noticed him, they could both agree to play at ignorance and pass each other in silence.
if even the thought of going so ignored wasn't itself both a balm and a sting. / @ulircursed














