I watch the city burn, these dreams like ashes float away...
Life had not been kind to Lilitha, but she had learned from a young age not to expect kindness in this world. When the gods themselves mocked their people’s pain, stripped away home and family and love in equal measure, stole pieces of a person’s soul just to make a point, a young girl quickly learned kindness was not woven into the fabric of this world, or written in the stars that shone cold and distant in the sky.
No, life had hardened the soft edges of her face, carved planes of muscle from once-soft curves, and left the story of the gods’ cruelty branded and gouged into her skin. Scars marred her back where wings had once been, great jagged wounds where they’d burned away into nothing as the fire that had once been her only friend was returned to her in an act of violence her young mind could never have conceived of.
Old burn scars marred her dark chest, and a claw mark dragged down her face, starting on her forehead and cutting down through her eye and all the way to her jaw, a gift of one of Carnage’s Taiga-devouring beasts. It had taken months to regain the vision in that eye, and to heal from the wounds of that terrible day.
Her hide was still dotted with little pock-marks and slashes where claws had sunk in and grasped her and tried to drag her under the rising floodwaters while she fought to find any trace of the wolf man who had taken her in when no one else had, who had made her heart ache with longing for the brief tastes of family and home he’d given her.
She should have known better. But every time, her traitorous heart tripped and fell and hoped again. And the second she did, disaster inevitably struck. It was almost laughable; other people were so casually happy, so easy and comfortable with the belief that the world was safe, that things would go right, that there was some force watching over them that might let them fall but would ultimately pick them back up again and help them to rise.
Her, though? Life seemed to tangle up around her very existence, little knots and threads putting tension in the web and pulling threads and lines of fate away, just enough to keep her isolated, tearing away every chance at forging a strong and lasting connection.
When the world itself had rebelled, spewing lava and calling the sea to flood out the residents of the only land she’d ever tried to call home, when she’d finally let the monsters that had overtaken their land chase her out through the hole she’d burned in the invaders’ magic wall, she had returned to the forest, the land of her perpetual banishment. She’d roamed the vast and relatively empty woods, letting her body heal slowly from the damage she’d taken, and at least trying to let her heart do the same.
It was so much easier to let it harden, though, to embrace the truth that breaking was its only talent. A year came and went, and Taiga once again became habitable. And out of stubborn pride, she’d ventured back into Taiga’s haunted forests, hiding in the mist and the shadows and searching for clues of Ruan’s fate. If he had survived, he’d find his way back to Taiga.
Someday.
Years came and went, and eventually she had to cede the truth: her strange wolf was gone. Still, whether in his memory or in defiance of the fairies who had banished her from these lands to begin with, she kept quiet watch over the forest, not interfering in the activities of others who chose to wander these dark and haunted woods. Until one day she wandered closer to the coast than usual and caught a familiar scent in the air.
“Moment?” she asked softly, brow furrowing as she breathed in the scent again. It was definitely him - she could smell the faint burn of falling stars in his scent, and she followed it to the edge of the water. “Come out,” she called as her golden eyes settled on his form slumped in the water. “It’s too cold for a swim.”
...your voice I never heard, only silence.