This game they play has deadly consequences.
It is a sharpened version of the usual childish games, but it is suiting for the two of them. Suiting that they make each other bleed to find out if they can, if they will. If one of them will be the first to give.
Neither do, of course, and she does not give him the satisfaction of seeing the doubt in her mind.
(She is, of course, still mortal—and it is strange to place her life in his hands.)
But he presses a kiss to the corner of her mouth and, this time, she allows it. For a second, at least, before she pulls back slightly and moves onward to the next stage of the game. To the moment when his fangs sink into her throat and the favor of poison is returned unto her tenfold. She sputters when she feels the toxin holds onto her—faster, perhaps, because she does not fight it but instead turns to embrace it.
She holds it closer to her breast, letting it sink into her without stiffening.
And it takes her.
Her eyes roll back into her head as her muscles lock. Her breathing shortens until she nearly swallows her own tongue. Until foam coats her tongue, touches the corner of her mouth, runs down her chin. She falls to her knees and then to her side, the ivory of her armor thudding as it lands into the dirt and the fauna.
So this is the other side, she thinks, with awe.
She sees the light begin to fade until there is only his face and the halo around it.
She smiles when even that flickers and the darkness claims her.
but in all chaos, there is calculation