In the distance, the echo of her once-student's outrage. At her feet, the cooling corpse of her elder brother, victim of a conflict of which the outcome was never really in question. Oh, his reach had been superior; his strength certainly was. But he'd been a sloppy student, and she --
Why, she'd had ten years longer than he to perfect her art.
A decade ago, she'd been too shocked to mourn what she'd done to him. Today, there is a trace of grief in her colourless eyes, a trace of regret for the brother that she'd never much liked; for the brother whose impotent fury hadn't even nicked the cotton of her shirt. His eyes have already grown dull and flat, by the time she bends to smooth them closed. They reflect only an uncertain silhouette, and only dimly, at that.
All things being as they are, it's no wonder that she moves away without a backwards glance. And that's a shame, because if she'd spared the time for one, she might have glimpsed what is writhing like vaporous tears from her brother's dead eyes.
***
It is violence that has her attention, as always, for it is violence that defines her existence; it is simply her nature to heed its call. It is Agnieszka's distress in particular that calls to her, inspiring real haste in her barefoot stride, but it is the roar of Kerrak's wrath that has drawn the silver from her veins. It glitters like an unnatural sweat across her brow, her bare arms; it wells in the hollows of elbow, throat, knuckles. With each step, there is more of the molten iron rising through her flesh, and with each step the din of combat becomes clearer -- becomes more
defined.
For it's an army through which this masked swordswoman strides, albeit one that only she experiences; a
battlefield peopled by shadows and ghosts of which very few faces are detailed, very few features so distinct as to be recognisable. But there ... is weak Caerwyn, with whom she'd once shared a tent and a good deal more; Caerwyn, towards whose back a great axe is swung, and she -- why, she sidesteps to permit this, moves herself away from the back that had been hers to
protect. He falls, does young Caerwyn, and all his bitter blackmail with him, and the sharp pang at this sight distracts Ariane so deeply that she all but collides with the axe's wielder. Her shoulder nudges into his broad chest; her pale eyes stare up at his sparkling own -- oh, the sapphire eyes of Rhys ap'Sien, the lover that war had forbidden her; who has just slain a man that she'd despised.
Now, as then, she smiles up to him: this crooked, trembling smile, as if he filled her heart even as this ruinous world were breaking it. Now, as then, the real war -- between duty and passion, between honour and
love -- slows the frantic race of her heart.
Now, as then, she falls upon a man distracted by precious eyes and a pretty face, and lances the life from his heart before he realises himself lost.
He sinks against her, this lone brightness in a war that had seemed unending. He sags into her embrace, just as he had done eight years ago, and the grief is a sickness at the pit of her stomach; the horror is a pain that swells at the base of her neck as if it meant to crush her skull. And:
"Not you," she whispers into his shoulder. Consumed in dying, his response is nothing but a sigh into her throat. And: "I just wanted to
live," she pleads by his ear;
prays, as if in death he might understand the act of a girl so desperately young, so utterly afraid; as if he might comprehend the heart of a woman who has accepted the necessity of his murder. But the world is not so kind, and neither is this dream-within-a-dream. Merciless, the ache ruptures through her skull, so that she must finally retreat from that corpse, and it's not until she has pulled the knife free of its chest that she realises what is climbing from the muddy ground behind her. She turns, to face what she'd glimpsed reflected in that dagger's blade...
And they fall upon her like a vengeful mob.