This is for the Moment in Time competition hosted by @Ryria!
[/MEDIA]
__________________________
a __t h r e a d__ o f __l o v e__a n d__l i g h t
A t h o u s a n d years ago, the gods died in a country far,far away.
She wondered if it had been anything like this. Stone and wood digging painfully into her flesh, piled upon her too high and too great to even attempt to move from under it, her only option to grit her teeth and wait for what would come. Debris blurred the grey horizon, without even the promise of dawn to either bring her salvation or end the pain that pressed into her stomach and inched toward her heart.
She felt blood, hot against her skin, trickle down her leg, which ached and cried out for supplication, begged for some kind of relief from this enduring, constant pain. Unfortunately, the rest of her body was in near the same position and she could do nothing but weakly scrabble at the rocks, fingers crisscrossed with scratches and bruises blossoming like black and purple roses across her thin hands.
She takes a deep breath, steeling herself against the ache that made her eyes leaden and her heart slow. Forces her breaths, shallow and thin, to be steady.
"I'm not afraid." She says aloud. The words ring in the hollow space, true despite the aching, the building pressure behind her eyes that can find no relief in tears. She had spent too long in its arms to fear the touch of it. Her grandparents, passed on and mourned. Her father then her mother in turn, seeing it reflected in her eyes as every day she had inched closer to painful starvation. It had anchored itself in her flesh, rotting fingers digging themselves into her core, and it would never let go, not as long as she still had mind to remember what had happened to her.
To die once more was only a trifle compared to all the loss she had endured.
No, she thinks as she draws in a rattling breath. No, she is not scared to die. And if she is to die today, she will with her head high, as proud and unyielding as stone. But she does not want to die, though the world has never cared very much about what she wanted. There is so much that she needs to do.
She did not believe overmuch in the Spirit, and even if she had, she saw no reason why it would deign to help her now, when it had turned its blinding gaze from her for so long. Even if she had found her reverence now, as her life sat on a knife's edge between survival and shadow, her prayers would not be answered.
They never were.
Her father had told her often before he died that she had her grandmother's hands, trim and elegant, able to conjure wondrous things with even the slightest touch.
She wondered if that was the problem, as the press of stone and slab continues to weigh on her, as the building groans under its own weight, moving ever closer to its—and her—doom. That the hands, raised in supplication to the Spirit, were the hands of a people who did not believe in It, and so It averted its gaze from this little girl, Qadir because a fourth of her blood had run through a woman with hair of shadow and hands of brilliance. But even if that was the case, she could not bring herself to regret that she had been given such a feature.
Not when her father had loved it so.
He had always took her hands in his own, so small against the laced net of his fingers. He talked of the Qadir, those silvery, secluded people across the sea, burned by the scorching sun and cooled by fountains that spun their water in shining arcs across marble as pale as ice that shone faintly like a pearl in the crescent moonlight. He had them too, small-wristed and clever-fingered, and from his hands came delicate braids that crowned her mother in scarlet brilliance, and vines and little birds that curled through stone and wood, giving a house glory down to the roots of its firm foundation.
But best were his stories, that spun out and sang in the way of the Qadir, styled in the way of cool desert nights and the click of glinting silver gears into their place. He spoke of her grandmother and grandfather, passed before they could meet Tatiana, but he assured her, voice full of moonlight on still lakes, that their shining blood ran through her, as surely as their blood ran through him. That it sung out to her, kept them in her heart and her in theirs. That even in two worlds, they were tied together, bound in their souls, in the dark lashes that rimmed her eyes and the way she moved, like the wind across the dessert.
In his stories, she had seen her grandmother dance, her feet quicksilver across the floor. Her voice too, raised in song in a foreign tongue, was harsher and softer all at once, her sentences spinning like threads ever forward, and when her father spoke of her his own voice softened, like the wind blowing through reeds upon the river, elevated and made lovely and foreign in his reminiscence.
She had been sent dancing into the strong arms of Tatiana's grandfather, whose voice boomed like the wind buffeting the stern cliff faces, whose laughter was the river against sun-warmed stone. Whose hands, rough and calloused with his work, were capable of surpassing gentleness, curling his fingers into the moist soil, coaxing to verdant abundance corn that swelled and ripened in the blade. They had fit, her father had told her, ever so neatly with his mothers, fingers linked like they were designed to do so. The ensuring years had wound silver into her lustrous hair and white into his, wore their faces and creased their brows, but they had been alive to the last, his mother as bright and blazing as the beautiful, terrible lands from which she had hailed, and his father like the abundance of harvest till the day they had drawn their last breath and went hand in hand beyond what Tatiana could know.
Her beautiful, lovely mother would smile as her husband spoke, and idly bounce whichever child she was holding at the moment. She had hair that spilled the blooming sunset upon her golden shoulders, that danced hypnotically like the fire that was ever compared to the blazing strands, and she would speak of her own family when Tatiana and Lanfrey begged her of it, of strength in adversity and glory in what they touched. She did not have her husband's flair for the dramatic, but there was something holy in her words, the way she spoke of celebration and joy even in the simplest of times.
These lives had not been recorded for future generations, passing like shadows with the onset of the day. No paintings had been made of Tatiana's beautiful grandmother, or her fierce grandfather, but her parents had carried their images in their hearts, branded across their souls, that marvelous thread of sunset and summer that bound mother to son, father to daughter. That bound Tatiana to them both.
When she had been younger, she had wished so dearly to be like them. To be able to set her mother laughing as he twirled her across the room, skirts of white and blue and gold flaring out like a queen, skin sundrenched and eyes alight in radiance. To see in the way her mother saw—to find the beauty and glory in even the barest crackle of flame in a hearth. And she was sure that deep inside her, spiderwebbing through her veins, were those brilliant, beautiful threads of life. At the joints where she was made, where the curve of her neck met the arc of her shoulder, she was seamed with light running like white rivers through her flesh.
There may have been sorrow, there may have been lack, but all Tatiana could remember of those twilight days before her parents died was her stomach hurting from laughing too much, and the silverly moonlight on the golden floorboards as her parents brushed out her hair, telling stories all the while.
Such light had ended when her father passed. Her mother, though she was fierce and unyielding, was weakened by the recent birth of Tatiana's youngest sibling, and passed more quietly than Tatiana could have ever imagined her beautiful, radiant mother could go, to slip into sleep and never wake up.
When they were gone, it was like a light was snuffed out, and Tatiana was left groping in the darkness of a world that she did not understand, too young and too old all at once.
She had no-one to compare herself to, no-one to study and follow unflinchingly into their blinding destiny. She might have followed her parents without a second thought, who if not hand in hand were one after the other gone, but she had made a promise to her mother to look after her siblings, and she could not deny what had turned out to be her last request. So she bound her hair tight to her forehead and wandered around the city as night fell, asking and asking and asking, until a steward looked at her with hawk sharp eyes and saw the desperation he wanted in a good worker.
And she had toiled and burned in those dusky hours, suffered for a light nothing more than a flickering candle against the haze compared to what she had once known.
But then she had stolen the coins, stolen herself salvation, and they had shone like starlight through her fingers, illuminating her bone moon white and her flesh sun red, neither the sun of her mother or the moon of her father, illuminating a way forward that her heart had never touched on, too wrapped up was she in the darkness of her grief.
She had pulled herself forward, following ghostly white lanterns, down a path that curled with black ivy and crumbled below her feet, into night darker and darker, beyond what she thought a person could do to the other. Even now, beyond any hope, she could not allow herself to think of the things she had seen, the secrets she had kept, only the aftereffects of her silence, long after she had strengthened her stomach and learned how to not recoil from what she was told, in dark alleys and gilded offices alike.
There was no luxury that she hadn't charted in spidery lines of dark ink, winding their way down her leather bound ledger, plum cover long faded to gentle brown. Her fingers perpetually stained with oily black, tapping out an impatient staccato on her desk. Hands stained with greed, darkened with her want and desire. She could see it on her now, see her unending greed.
True, she did not want jewels that glitter in the hollow of her throat, rubies like fat drops of blood that winked and shone in the light. Those had spilled through her fingers a thousand times without a second thought to their worth to her, only the cost to whoever had paid her to tend their books. Chalices of silver, with square cut emeralds. Ropes of pearls made luminescent under the glare of a thousand tallow candles, all things that had passed through her hands without even the slightest bit of hesitation, the smallest hint of desire. What could she do with such things? Pass them on to her sisters and brothers, more than likely, to be used as nothing more than trinkets. Of worth as nothing but to bind Mina's hair with shining opals the size of pigeon eggs for use as she washed the dishes, send Galien to his apprenticeship with a silver chalice full of cream to drink and a loaf of bread and slice of cheese tucked into a satchel of gold. But still, she wanted more and more. She had long despaired of ever filling that void, but she thought—foolishly—that she could soothe it, contented herself that she had no strange burning desire to spend her coin on foolish endeavors, no need to spend her coin for the sake of it.
And she did not desire roasted peacock rubbed all over with a thousand spices, or wine with great white pearls dissolved into it. Why should she? She had seen the expense, thought it not a good use of her money. Mina, her sweet little sister, had learned to make griddle cakes topped with peaches soaked in honey and cream, and eggs fried with onions and bell peppers, and spicy sausages that sizzled and crackled in the pan, where you could dip slices of bread in the brown drippings they left behind. They sat around the table on rest days and laughed now, their mouths sticky with sweet, as the warm sun streamed its way through the east-facing windows, and it was then that Tatiana dared to hope that she was satisfied. That this—abundance, safety—was enough for the dark thing that coiled in her. That her family was enough. That she was enough.
But it was never enough.
Even with her prosperity, even as she knew not what more she could have, still, she wanted, wanted with a great and terrible longing she could not ignore, that settled on her shoulders in sleep and curled its winding tail around her throat.
Long ago, she had stolen what she thought was salvation.
It had saved her siblings, but had it saved herself?
"Every day, stars fall to the earth. If you aid one to return to the sky, you are given great gifts. But if you steal one for yourself, you are cursed. Do not take what is not yours, and give what you have to others, and you will be full of light." The words ring in her head, an old story of her mother that she had breathlessly requested over and over again, promising reverently that she wouldn't Mama, she'd be good and help the star!
But she had failed, breaking that promise. She had been doomed the second that she had taken those coins. Doomed the second she stood there, her heart in her throat, as another person paid for what she had done. Doomed as she decided that she was willing to pay that price, though it was not hers to decide.
No, there was no light in her. She had never had it, or if she had, it had long shriveled and died out.
In Lanfrey, it's there. She thinks of her brother with a painful rend of her heart as the mound of stone shifts. It's a struggle to get air now, and though she fiercely attempts to stay it, involuntary panic seizes at her throat.
Lanfrey, who shouted at her angrily that Tatie, this isn't right, standing across from her in their beautiful new apartment, with golden floorboards and snug stone walls like silver, paid for in blood—if not on her own hands, then certainly on the coins that had been passed to her in exchange for her service and her silence. Who had so desperately tried to guide her away from the winding, shadowy path, begged her to stop, that our parents would never want this for you, Tatie please listen to me- while his hair glowed like the dying ashes of a hearth, darker then their mothers but made brilliant in the shine of the new glass upon it.
She hadn't. She couldn't. She had to chose between her parents love and her own survival, and she had made her decision in that terrible, painful moment. She had the words of her mother and father, preaching kindness and honesty, and she had chosen this over their memories.
Truly in all of her siblings, there is the light and joy that she so remembers in her mother and father. In Lanfrey and Mina, in Mauda and Galien and sweet little Isobel, who didn't know her parents before they passed but who is still so much like them. It was not so for her. It is only her stained by this darkness, this need.
If her parents had been light itself, a shining thread that wound through their blood through mothers and foremothers alive, Tatiana was no true end to their love, one that spanned thousands of miles and thousands of years, far off branches tangling from the farthest reaches of the North to the blazing swell of the furthermost cities in the South. She could see none of the beauty, none of that same radiance in herself. She saw only shadow. That dark, inky hunger had settled deep in her bones. It swelled and blistered like a thing alive, and she knew with the kind of cool eyed clarity that only came from closeness to death that she would never be free of what she had taken in her own heart.
What had happened to her? She wondered, as she shifted the rubble off of her, but she knew the answer in her heart even before the question even fully crystallized in her mind.
There had been a curse on those coins, those fallen stars that blazed through her worn, unworthy, fingers. If not a true one, she had put it on herself. She had doomed herself to half-life with their taking, a life with no end to pain and a hunger with no way to sate it.
Even if she lived forever, she would never fill the hollow where her heart should have been, glowing like an ember. If she died now, or died fifty years hence, she would never have all she wanted, because she wanted everything. She would rip apart the world—and herself—to get even the thinnest sliver of it, even as the coins gathered in her hand and she could see no more use of them herself.
The worst part about her, she thinks weakly, blinded by her pain, is that she would do it all over again. Take the coins. Walk this path. She knows she would do it again, eyes open to what it would stir in her, deep and primal and angry in a way she had never been angry before, dark in a way that she knows her parents would grieve to see. She could not see herself doing otherwise, not when it had been that which had given her life. Given her a new light to follow in the dark.
Maybe they would hate her for it, when she saw them again.
And with the way the stone around her began to crumble as the grey of the sky turns to blue, staining the clouds blushing pink and smiling gold, it seemed that it could be much sooner than she would have wanted.
Well, not on her watch.
She bites her cheek so hard she tastes the tang, straining with renewed effort to dislodge herself.
She didn't want them to hate her.
She does not fear death. But when she faces eternity yawning before here, she feels more unfulfilled than ever. Here in the coming of the day, she has little hope, but she has faced darker nights then this and survived. if she could not find her own light, she would make it like her Qadir grandmother, whose hands and blood were Tatiana's own now.
She didn't want to die.
She would not die. She would not allow herself to, whatever spirit or god thought otherwise.
Something under her loosens, and with a painful grunt of effort, she manages to slip her leg free. She aches and trembles like a leaf in the cold breeze, but she is free.
She needs to go.
She stumbles to her feet, and as the light shatters across the stone and sends them crashing down, her soul shining, leg burning, she throws herself toward the blinding d a w n.
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AN: Technically this is near death, so despite how this sounds she /does/ survive this xD. I had an ending where it was more obvious, but I thought this was a better place
AN2: You would not believe how much my fingers hurt after i did the bolding and coloring thing lmaoo. If you can't read it please let me know! I can add a copy without the formatting.
The coloring is just words that are related to light! The bolded words actually make a kind of poem.
a __t h r e a d__ o f __l o v e__a n d__l i g h t
A t h o u s a n d years ago, the gods died in a country far,far away.
She wondered if it had been anything like this. Stone and wood digging painfully into her flesh, piled upon her too high and too great to even attempt to move from under it, her only option to grit her teeth and wait for what would come. Debris blurred the grey horizon, without even the promise of dawn to either bring her salvation or end the pain that pressed into her stomach and inched toward her heart.
She felt blood, hot against her skin, trickle down her leg, which ached and cried out for supplication, begged for some kind of relief from this enduring, constant pain. Unfortunately, the rest of her body was in near the same position and she could do nothing but weakly scrabble at the rocks, fingers crisscrossed with scratches and bruises blossoming like black and purple roses across her thin hands.
She takes a deep breath, steeling herself against the ache that made her eyes leaden and her heart slow. Forces her breaths, shallow and thin, to be steady.
"I'm not afraid." She says aloud. The words ring in the hollow space, true despite the aching, the building pressure behind her eyes that can find no relief in tears. She had spent too long in its arms to fear the touch of it. Her grandparents, passed on and mourned. Her father then her mother in turn, seeing it reflected in her eyes as every day she had inched closer to painful starvation. It had anchored itself in her flesh, rotting fingers digging themselves into her core, and it would never let go, not as long as she still had mind to remember what had happened to her.
To die once more was only a trifle compared to all the loss she had endured.
No, she thinks as she draws in a rattling breath. No, she is not scared to die. And if she is to die today, she will with her head high, as proud and unyielding as stone. But she does not want to die, though the world has never cared very much about what she wanted. There is so much that she needs to do.
She did not believe overmuch in the Spirit, and even if she had, she saw no reason why it would deign to help her now, when it had turned its blinding gaze from her for so long. Even if she had found her reverence now, as her life sat on a knife's edge between survival and shadow, her prayers would not be answered.
They never were.
Her father had told her often before he died that she had her grandmother's hands, trim and elegant, able to conjure wondrous things with even the slightest touch.
She wondered if that was the problem, as the press of stone and slab continues to weigh on her, as the building groans under its own weight, moving ever closer to its—and her—doom. That the hands, raised in supplication to the Spirit, were the hands of a people who did not believe in It, and so It averted its gaze from this little girl, Qadir because a fourth of her blood had run through a woman with hair of shadow and hands of brilliance. But even if that was the case, she could not bring herself to regret that she had been given such a feature.
Not when her father had loved it so.
He had always took her hands in his own, so small against the laced net of his fingers. He talked of the Qadir, those silvery, secluded people across the sea, burned by the scorching sun and cooled by fountains that spun their water in shining arcs across marble as pale as ice that shone faintly like a pearl in the crescent moonlight. He had them too, small-wristed and clever-fingered, and from his hands came delicate braids that crowned her mother in scarlet brilliance, and vines and little birds that curled through stone and wood, giving a house glory down to the roots of its firm foundation.
But best were his stories, that spun out and sang in the way of the Qadir, styled in the way of cool desert nights and the click of glinting silver gears into their place. He spoke of her grandmother and grandfather, passed before they could meet Tatiana, but he assured her, voice full of moonlight on still lakes, that their shining blood ran through her, as surely as their blood ran through him. That it sung out to her, kept them in her heart and her in theirs. That even in two worlds, they were tied together, bound in their souls, in the dark lashes that rimmed her eyes and the way she moved, like the wind across the dessert.
In his stories, she had seen her grandmother dance, her feet quicksilver across the floor. Her voice too, raised in song in a foreign tongue, was harsher and softer all at once, her sentences spinning like threads ever forward, and when her father spoke of her his own voice softened, like the wind blowing through reeds upon the river, elevated and made lovely and foreign in his reminiscence.
She had been sent dancing into the strong arms of Tatiana's grandfather, whose voice boomed like the wind buffeting the stern cliff faces, whose laughter was the river against sun-warmed stone. Whose hands, rough and calloused with his work, were capable of surpassing gentleness, curling his fingers into the moist soil, coaxing to verdant abundance corn that swelled and ripened in the blade. They had fit, her father had told her, ever so neatly with his mothers, fingers linked like they were designed to do so. The ensuring years had wound silver into her lustrous hair and white into his, wore their faces and creased their brows, but they had been alive to the last, his mother as bright and blazing as the beautiful, terrible lands from which she had hailed, and his father like the abundance of harvest till the day they had drawn their last breath and went hand in hand beyond what Tatiana could know.
Her beautiful, lovely mother would smile as her husband spoke, and idly bounce whichever child she was holding at the moment. She had hair that spilled the blooming sunset upon her golden shoulders, that danced hypnotically like the fire that was ever compared to the blazing strands, and she would speak of her own family when Tatiana and Lanfrey begged her of it, of strength in adversity and glory in what they touched. She did not have her husband's flair for the dramatic, but there was something holy in her words, the way she spoke of celebration and joy even in the simplest of times.
These lives had not been recorded for future generations, passing like shadows with the onset of the day. No paintings had been made of Tatiana's beautiful grandmother, or her fierce grandfather, but her parents had carried their images in their hearts, branded across their souls, that marvelous thread of sunset and summer that bound mother to son, father to daughter. That bound Tatiana to them both.
When she had been younger, she had wished so dearly to be like them. To be able to set her mother laughing as he twirled her across the room, skirts of white and blue and gold flaring out like a queen, skin sundrenched and eyes alight in radiance. To see in the way her mother saw—to find the beauty and glory in even the barest crackle of flame in a hearth. And she was sure that deep inside her, spiderwebbing through her veins, were those brilliant, beautiful threads of life. At the joints where she was made, where the curve of her neck met the arc of her shoulder, she was seamed with light running like white rivers through her flesh.
There may have been sorrow, there may have been lack, but all Tatiana could remember of those twilight days before her parents died was her stomach hurting from laughing too much, and the silverly moonlight on the golden floorboards as her parents brushed out her hair, telling stories all the while.
Such light had ended when her father passed. Her mother, though she was fierce and unyielding, was weakened by the recent birth of Tatiana's youngest sibling, and passed more quietly than Tatiana could have ever imagined her beautiful, radiant mother could go, to slip into sleep and never wake up.
When they were gone, it was like a light was snuffed out, and Tatiana was left groping in the darkness of a world that she did not understand, too young and too old all at once.
She had no-one to compare herself to, no-one to study and follow unflinchingly into their blinding destiny. She might have followed her parents without a second thought, who if not hand in hand were one after the other gone, but she had made a promise to her mother to look after her siblings, and she could not deny what had turned out to be her last request. So she bound her hair tight to her forehead and wandered around the city as night fell, asking and asking and asking, until a steward looked at her with hawk sharp eyes and saw the desperation he wanted in a good worker.
And she had toiled and burned in those dusky hours, suffered for a light nothing more than a flickering candle against the haze compared to what she had once known.
But then she had stolen the coins, stolen herself salvation, and they had shone like starlight through her fingers, illuminating her bone moon white and her flesh sun red, neither the sun of her mother or the moon of her father, illuminating a way forward that her heart had never touched on, too wrapped up was she in the darkness of her grief.
She had pulled herself forward, following ghostly white lanterns, down a path that curled with black ivy and crumbled below her feet, into night darker and darker, beyond what she thought a person could do to the other. Even now, beyond any hope, she could not allow herself to think of the things she had seen, the secrets she had kept, only the aftereffects of her silence, long after she had strengthened her stomach and learned how to not recoil from what she was told, in dark alleys and gilded offices alike.
There was no luxury that she hadn't charted in spidery lines of dark ink, winding their way down her leather bound ledger, plum cover long faded to gentle brown. Her fingers perpetually stained with oily black, tapping out an impatient staccato on her desk. Hands stained with greed, darkened with her want and desire. She could see it on her now, see her unending greed.
True, she did not want jewels that glitter in the hollow of her throat, rubies like fat drops of blood that winked and shone in the light. Those had spilled through her fingers a thousand times without a second thought to their worth to her, only the cost to whoever had paid her to tend their books. Chalices of silver, with square cut emeralds. Ropes of pearls made luminescent under the glare of a thousand tallow candles, all things that had passed through her hands without even the slightest bit of hesitation, the smallest hint of desire. What could she do with such things? Pass them on to her sisters and brothers, more than likely, to be used as nothing more than trinkets. Of worth as nothing but to bind Mina's hair with shining opals the size of pigeon eggs for use as she washed the dishes, send Galien to his apprenticeship with a silver chalice full of cream to drink and a loaf of bread and slice of cheese tucked into a satchel of gold. But still, she wanted more and more. She had long despaired of ever filling that void, but she thought—foolishly—that she could soothe it, contented herself that she had no strange burning desire to spend her coin on foolish endeavors, no need to spend her coin for the sake of it.
And she did not desire roasted peacock rubbed all over with a thousand spices, or wine with great white pearls dissolved into it. Why should she? She had seen the expense, thought it not a good use of her money. Mina, her sweet little sister, had learned to make griddle cakes topped with peaches soaked in honey and cream, and eggs fried with onions and bell peppers, and spicy sausages that sizzled and crackled in the pan, where you could dip slices of bread in the brown drippings they left behind. They sat around the table on rest days and laughed now, their mouths sticky with sweet, as the warm sun streamed its way through the east-facing windows, and it was then that Tatiana dared to hope that she was satisfied. That this—abundance, safety—was enough for the dark thing that coiled in her. That her family was enough. That she was enough.
But it was never enough.
Even with her prosperity, even as she knew not what more she could have, still, she wanted, wanted with a great and terrible longing she could not ignore, that settled on her shoulders in sleep and curled its winding tail around her throat.
Long ago, she had stolen what she thought was salvation.
It had saved her siblings, but had it saved herself?
"Every day, stars fall to the earth. If you aid one to return to the sky, you are given great gifts. But if you steal one for yourself, you are cursed. Do not take what is not yours, and give what you have to others, and you will be full of light." The words ring in her head, an old story of her mother that she had breathlessly requested over and over again, promising reverently that she wouldn't Mama, she'd be good and help the star!
But she had failed, breaking that promise. She had been doomed the second that she had taken those coins. Doomed the second she stood there, her heart in her throat, as another person paid for what she had done. Doomed as she decided that she was willing to pay that price, though it was not hers to decide.
No, there was no light in her. She had never had it, or if she had, it had long shriveled and died out.
In Lanfrey, it's there. She thinks of her brother with a painful rend of her heart as the mound of stone shifts. It's a struggle to get air now, and though she fiercely attempts to stay it, involuntary panic seizes at her throat.
Lanfrey, who shouted at her angrily that Tatie, this isn't right, standing across from her in their beautiful new apartment, with golden floorboards and snug stone walls like silver, paid for in blood—if not on her own hands, then certainly on the coins that had been passed to her in exchange for her service and her silence. Who had so desperately tried to guide her away from the winding, shadowy path, begged her to stop, that our parents would never want this for you, Tatie please listen to me- while his hair glowed like the dying ashes of a hearth, darker then their mothers but made brilliant in the shine of the new glass upon it.
She hadn't. She couldn't. She had to chose between her parents love and her own survival, and she had made her decision in that terrible, painful moment. She had the words of her mother and father, preaching kindness and honesty, and she had chosen this over their memories.
Truly in all of her siblings, there is the light and joy that she so remembers in her mother and father. In Lanfrey and Mina, in Mauda and Galien and sweet little Isobel, who didn't know her parents before they passed but who is still so much like them. It was not so for her. It is only her stained by this darkness, this need.
If her parents had been light itself, a shining thread that wound through their blood through mothers and foremothers alive, Tatiana was no true end to their love, one that spanned thousands of miles and thousands of years, far off branches tangling from the farthest reaches of the North to the blazing swell of the furthermost cities in the South. She could see none of the beauty, none of that same radiance in herself. She saw only shadow. That dark, inky hunger had settled deep in her bones. It swelled and blistered like a thing alive, and she knew with the kind of cool eyed clarity that only came from closeness to death that she would never be free of what she had taken in her own heart.
What had happened to her? She wondered, as she shifted the rubble off of her, but she knew the answer in her heart even before the question even fully crystallized in her mind.
There had been a curse on those coins, those fallen stars that blazed through her worn, unworthy, fingers. If not a true one, she had put it on herself. She had doomed herself to half-life with their taking, a life with no end to pain and a hunger with no way to sate it.
Even if she lived forever, she would never fill the hollow where her heart should have been, glowing like an ember. If she died now, or died fifty years hence, she would never have all she wanted, because she wanted everything. She would rip apart the world—and herself—to get even the thinnest sliver of it, even as the coins gathered in her hand and she could see no more use of them herself.
The worst part about her, she thinks weakly, blinded by her pain, is that she would do it all over again. Take the coins. Walk this path. She knows she would do it again, eyes open to what it would stir in her, deep and primal and angry in a way she had never been angry before, dark in a way that she knows her parents would grieve to see. She could not see herself doing otherwise, not when it had been that which had given her life. Given her a new light to follow in the dark.
Maybe they would hate her for it, when she saw them again.
And with the way the stone around her began to crumble as the grey of the sky turns to blue, staining the clouds blushing pink and smiling gold, it seemed that it could be much sooner than she would have wanted.
Well, not on her watch.
She bites her cheek so hard she tastes the tang, straining with renewed effort to dislodge herself.
She didn't want them to hate her.
She does not fear death. But when she faces eternity yawning before here, she feels more unfulfilled than ever. Here in the coming of the day, she has little hope, but she has faced darker nights then this and survived. if she could not find her own light, she would make it like her Qadir grandmother, whose hands and blood were Tatiana's own now.
She didn't want to die.
She would not die. She would not allow herself to, whatever spirit or god thought otherwise.
Something under her loosens, and with a painful grunt of effort, she manages to slip her leg free. She aches and trembles like a leaf in the cold breeze, but she is free.
She needs to go.
She stumbles to her feet, and as the light shatters across the stone and sends them crashing down, her soul shining, leg burning, she throws herself toward the blinding d a w n.
__________________________
AN: Technically this is near death, so despite how this sounds she /does/ survive this xD. I had an ending where it was more obvious, but I thought this was a better place
AN2: You would not believe how much my fingers hurt after i did the bolding and coloring thing lmaoo. If you can't read it please let me know! I can add a copy without the formatting.
The coloring is just words that are related to light! The bolded words actually make a kind of poem.
Far far away this heart cried pain
She tears her core
She thinks to die
She had found survival
Even as doom raised hands of shadow
Of regret
So small, burned as ice from his hands
Crowned glory
______
Sang full their blood
bound in the wind
Raised threads of river
Dancing hands curling,
Wound blazing abundance beyond her
Speak glory
Holy
Joy
____
Passing images sunset mother
Queen in glory and rivers
Twilight on hair
Fierce into light
Unflinchingly bound in dusky haze
Stolen sun in grief
Ghostly with hope and ink stained greed
Hollow her fingers with nothing but void
Soothe it
Burning dissolved into her
She was never enough
Even salvation saved her
Doomed her
Her shriveled heart shouted please
She hadn't
She had chosen
The light
But not for her
_____
Wound years tangling in beauty
Hunger blistered cool in her heart
Her heart curse blazed
Doomed to life
To hollow world in herself
Blinded
Eyes open in dark
Light
Crumble to death
Free as the dawn
She tears her core
She thinks to die
She had found survival
Even as doom raised hands of shadow
Of regret
So small, burned as ice from his hands
Crowned glory
______
Sang full their blood
bound in the wind
Raised threads of river
Dancing hands curling,
Wound blazing abundance beyond her
Speak glory
Holy
Joy
____
Passing images sunset mother
Queen in glory and rivers
Twilight on hair
Fierce into light
Unflinchingly bound in dusky haze
Stolen sun in grief
Ghostly with hope and ink stained greed
Hollow her fingers with nothing but void
Soothe it
Burning dissolved into her
She was never enough
Even salvation saved her
Doomed her
Her shriveled heart shouted please
She hadn't
She had chosen
The light
But not for her
_____
Wound years tangling in beauty
Hunger blistered cool in her heart
Her heart curse blazed
Doomed to life
To hollow world in herself
Blinded
Eyes open in dark
Light
Crumble to death
Free as the dawn
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