the fire remains; oceane

[breach]

for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

That Oceane does not acknowledge the verbal bait does not dampen the rage in Breach’s belly. It only serves to harden it into something cold and flinty. Something sharp-toothed that rattles against her ribcage. This was the woman who lit the spark that had hurt her mother. This was the woman who had torn her first marriage apart. This was the woman who had ripped her from her home. This was no friend.

Her lips peel back over her teeth, but she doesn’t say anything further.

Not at first.

She just watches, listening, taking every word that Oceane offers and dissecting them carefully. Breach pulls them apart. Studying the entrails and the meaning behind each trapped syllable.

When Oceane finishes with her threat, there’s a pause—a breath.

And then the cracking of thunder as Breach laughs.

It’s short-lived but it comes from the depths of her chest. At once heavy and quick to escape, the laughter fades into the air around them as swiftly as it had burst from the gun barrel of her mouth.

“You’re a fool then,” she shifts again. Shedding her mother’s form and rising as herself, young and lean. Hardened and twice reborn, her dual-colored eyes so much sharper than they had been in her youth. “I would have been content to leave Loess alone. I had no designs on your abandoned kingdom. I had no interest in this echoing shell of a land.” She sniffs, glancing around them, as if to prove her point.

It is perhaps the first moment Breach does not feel like just an Alpha of the pack but Queen of the East.

“But you chose to start peace negotiations by ripping me from my home. You chose to introduce yourself by removing me by force.” It was a law of the land—a law that ran even deeper than Breach’s endless fear of letting down her mother. It was the natural order. The will of survival. “And for that, you have my attention.” Her gaze levels. “I will not tell my Kingdom any such thing, least of all when ordered.”

A step forward, the movement as graceful and feline as when she was a cat.

“And I happen to like the pressure on your throat.”

She can still smell Oceane, the faintest scent of her and she peers hard in the direction.

“So the next time your people, as few as they may be, complain of the lack of air—remember it was your decision that kept the East planted firmly on your neck. You’re the one who made me your problem.”

though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth

@[Oceane]