It is the nature of dreams to end // Raul

[Warlight]

Warlight

Soul as sweet as blood red jam

She should be riding home on the wings of victory; this should be a high of her life. But little goes the way it should, how she expected it, death taught her that lesson before. But like so many of the lessons she had been taught, Warlight hadn't taken it to heart.

From the mountain, she teleports to the river. She is unthinking, her mind floating in a mist, unlike anything she had ever experienced. She bathes a while, washing the scent of Carnage from her skin in the numbing water, letting herself drift, and her eyes are soft and distant.

She falls into sleep with the river-water still clinging to her pelt; she walks awhile in unsettling dreams. Curled in the hyacinth, she sleeps and tries to heal, unaware of the forest-creatures which come up to sniff her and observe the almost-stag where it lies.

There had been a bargain.
She had been a fool to believe it meant anything to the dark god.

With the morning she rises, her black eyes blinking open as filtered sunlight catches the flecks of blue in their inky depths. There are no traces of the plague-sickness that had nearly disabled her only days before, and turning east, she begins to walk. She follows the coast in silence, never speaking to those she passes and wondering why she isn't eager to be home.

Regardless, her legs carry her back to Tephra, back to the place her little family called their own. She reaches home under the light of a full moon, a silver light that falls of the three small forms in the grasslands. The backs of her sleeping daughters gently rise and fall, and Will steps past them without a sound after a few moments spent fondly watching. In the distance, their father stands guard. The illuminated curves of his baroque frame cause her heart to skip a beat, but worry and shame mix with the feelings she is more used to feeling at the sight of him. She doesn't turn away, although she thinks of it, but continues walking to stand beside him, and look westward.

There is tension in the air, imagined or not; she feels it. It keeps her from reaching out, from touching the man she loves. She had asked so much of him without ever having to ask it. He had filled the void she had ripped in their family. And now, and now, she had been unfaithful. Or had she? She didn't know. She didn't know what to call it.
She didn't know what to say.