Post by max on Feb 4, 2010 15:57:27 GMT 10
Title: War Wounds I
Rating: M
Length: 440
Competitor: Uline
Round/Fight: 1/H
Summary: Angst. Guilt. What happens after wars. A story in several parts. Warning for suicide and self-injury, though not explicitly.
===========================
She is a war hero, many times over, wealthy enough to afford to buy her own house and servants. All the Yamani steel she could ever want.
And I have seen men who fought for me burst an ephemeral red as fine as the mists of the sea
She spends her time with her animals, after she comes back to Corus, comforted by their silence and stoic animal strength. And when they do not meet her eyes it is only to be expected. Her own kind cannot say as much.
‘Open the door Keladry.’
‘I don’t want to, Uline.’
The sun’s beams are sluggish in these autumnal days, filled with the falling dust and the soft golden light of the dead, but they look beautiful where they meet her boots, illuminating the stains she doesn’t think will ever come out of the leather.
I am the protector of the small with the blood of thousands on my hands
Sparrows whirl above her, flickering through the window set above the door she is leaning against, wondering, perhaps, why she won’t see the two-legger standing beyond it.
She takes out her belt knife, wonders when Uline will go away. Realise who she is, and what she’s done.
And what that makes her.
‘What are you doing, Keladry?’ and she can tell that Uline heard the dagger come unsheathed from the caution in her voice. (Though against what, when everything has already been done and torn asunder, Kel doesn’t know.)
‘Kel…’
She touches blade to her wrist and wonders. Of the boys she grew and trained with, seven are gone to the black god of their own choice. More have been killed or irrevocably injured by killing machines she wasn’t there to stop, and she is given purses of gold for not saving them.
She remembers the chamber, staring into her fishbowl world, and wants to storm right back and demand why it didn’t kill them then and there, if it had known they’d only die with the paint still wet upon their shields.
‘I’m sorry it’s come to this,’ comes Uline’s voice, and then Kel is flying across her bedroom floor, the door suddenly destroyed by a spell in Uline’s hand, and the lady herself stepping through the hole where it had been.
She is lovely. Unbearably so, with a purity and goodness that seems to catch the fading light and reflect it back out of herself.
In a distant past, Keladry remembers touching that skin, running her mouth over bones and skin and tendons and ligaments, as if she could drink the light of Uline like water.
Now she can only close her eyes.
Rating: M
Length: 440
Competitor: Uline
Round/Fight: 1/H
Summary: Angst. Guilt. What happens after wars. A story in several parts. Warning for suicide and self-injury, though not explicitly.
===========================
She is a war hero, many times over, wealthy enough to afford to buy her own house and servants. All the Yamani steel she could ever want.
And I have seen men who fought for me burst an ephemeral red as fine as the mists of the sea
She spends her time with her animals, after she comes back to Corus, comforted by their silence and stoic animal strength. And when they do not meet her eyes it is only to be expected. Her own kind cannot say as much.
‘Open the door Keladry.’
‘I don’t want to, Uline.’
The sun’s beams are sluggish in these autumnal days, filled with the falling dust and the soft golden light of the dead, but they look beautiful where they meet her boots, illuminating the stains she doesn’t think will ever come out of the leather.
I am the protector of the small with the blood of thousands on my hands
Sparrows whirl above her, flickering through the window set above the door she is leaning against, wondering, perhaps, why she won’t see the two-legger standing beyond it.
She takes out her belt knife, wonders when Uline will go away. Realise who she is, and what she’s done.
And what that makes her.
‘What are you doing, Keladry?’ and she can tell that Uline heard the dagger come unsheathed from the caution in her voice. (Though against what, when everything has already been done and torn asunder, Kel doesn’t know.)
‘Kel…’
She touches blade to her wrist and wonders. Of the boys she grew and trained with, seven are gone to the black god of their own choice. More have been killed or irrevocably injured by killing machines she wasn’t there to stop, and she is given purses of gold for not saving them.
She remembers the chamber, staring into her fishbowl world, and wants to storm right back and demand why it didn’t kill them then and there, if it had known they’d only die with the paint still wet upon their shields.
‘I’m sorry it’s come to this,’ comes Uline’s voice, and then Kel is flying across her bedroom floor, the door suddenly destroyed by a spell in Uline’s hand, and the lady herself stepping through the hole where it had been.
She is lovely. Unbearably so, with a purity and goodness that seems to catch the fading light and reflect it back out of herself.
In a distant past, Keladry remembers touching that skin, running her mouth over bones and skin and tendons and ligaments, as if she could drink the light of Uline like water.
Now she can only close her eyes.