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rainbowfic2015-01-08 03:46 am
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2015-01-08 03:46 am
faith shall save thee
Name: Mischa
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: white opal (hope), atomic tangerine (doomsday), dove grey (there is a period for hope and one for mourning), verdigris (cryptic marks), halloween orange (There are laws we must obey, certain ways this story goes.)
Supplies and Styles:
Word Count: 2823
Rating: R
Warnings: quite a lot of background violence, child/teenage soldiers and their deaths, the narrator's swearing.
Summary: What happens to Lilia, but not yet what happens after. Sequel to no surrender, no retreat.
Notes: Finally managed to finish this: I've been trying to write it as long as no sweet moment set aside, so I'm glad I did. So also just as rough and uneven in characterization given the long period of time it's been in development hell. This and no surrender, no retreat were originally planned as one story but I couldn't make it work at the time.
skip
I'm not sure whether this would qualify for the season bonus or not given that Lilia dies. On the other hand, given the setting is basically "everything sucks for everyone forever", she's definitely treated as well as everyone else. ...also wow, I am the winner of the "ironic titles" award.
.
They ain’t coming. Zorya bites down the words: no good to voice them, not when Lilia’s doing her best to keep morale up, even though they’re stretched to the breaking point. Fucking assholes, did they somehow forget the meaning of the words “high priority?” Tch. Wouldn’t surprise her if they did.
Her fingers curl around the hilt of her sword even tighter, channels power through it, even as the crystal at her waist pulses with the rhythm of Lilia’s orders - tch, I’ll make you a /real/ radio, Zorya had growled at her, not that stupid fucking magic crystal that shorts out every time there’s too much ambient magic, and it had been hard to see the mixture of confusion and the idea of delight in blue eyes, and Lilia’s question as she asks, how would that work? and Zorya biting down on the explanation of radio waves and growling out instead, doesn’t fucking matter as long as it works, girl.
She hadn’t gotten around to actually making the radio yet, hadn’t even gotten around to figuring out if it’d even work or what sort of power source she’d even try to bullshit into working. Hadn’t been time, what with everything going even further to hell in a handbasket. No shortage of shit to burn, at least, but they’re getting thin.
Zorya’s fine, of course, because this ain’t nothing since she’s so much more powerful than all the rest of them, but they’re human. Humans are fragile. Humans break. They’re holding, Lilia’s holding them, but how the fuck many have they lost? No fucking idea: she burns and doesn’t stop, one-woman army, and maybe that’s why they’re not all dead yet.
Then over the crystal comes the words she never wanted to hear but of fucking course it happened anyway, because it would, - “Labyrinth, preparing to open!”, one of Lilia’s little lieutenants who is trying not to scream in terror and not entirely succeeding. A tear straight into the heart of nightmare, hideous demon conjured straight from the dreams of a Wisp followed shortly after by a flood of more nightmare creatures as the world warped around them.
They’d all die, of course, except Zorya herself, because she’s a tough bitch and there’s very little that can kill her anymore - because if it was so easy to kill a Wisp, even one pretending to be human, they’d be done long ago. If they had more people, more mages on the ground, if those stupid fucking reinforcements had showed, they’d have enough to close the labyrinth without having to make a choice between immediate horrible death and slightly later horrible death.
Fucking hell.
Zorya can sense, even from where she is, the power building, the stability of the land around it eroding. They don’t have the mages to close it safely, the right numbers, and she’s not close enough, she has enough power to do this but can she even get there in time -
Lilia’s voice, clear and calm even now, comes over the crystal: Zorya can’t catch what she’s saying, because she’s shorting out and then gone-
One breath, two, three, surrounded by the sounds of battle and the crackle of power: she can feel the world warping, cracking to let nightmares in: too late to stop the labyrinth from opening, fucking hell, wasn’t like anyone else had enough power to hold the fucking thing closed, and she was in precisely the wrong goddamn place. She swears viciously, flame curling around her fist as she drives it straight through the nearest nightmare creature, snaps her fingers and incinerates another half-dozen, but they’re still pressing in, just before blue light erupts in the sky.
Only one girl with that precise shade of magic: Lilia, she knows, and the dome of the girl’s magic expands outward,clear and shimmering on the horizon, blue and white light steady and pure enough to light up the night bright as noonday sun. And it’s light, not even the lightning storm that is most of Lilia’s high-level casting: she’s skipped straight to the secondary manifestation of her power, tapped levels of power she’s never done before, and Zorya swears, already knowing the inevitable, even as the confused tangle of voices echoes across the crystal.
(humans can’t channel that much power: humans can’t channel that much power for very long and live. she’d done the calculations, when she’d made the Seven Seals in the first place, more than half out of her mind and going further every passing day. the curve between the power it took to even wield one of the weapons, the power a human being could safely handle, and how much was too much before they’d burn out. how much too much was the dividing line between life and death?)
Calculated possibilities, the thinnest curve, the thinnest line: she’d given humanity hope (hah) or the least shitty approximation of it, because hope had gotten them all into that mess to begin with, and it’s another fucking thing she has to live with. That every single fucking human sorcerer strong enough to wield one of the Seven Seals dies, burns out like a fucking meteor falling to earth, and how much time could each spent life buy? How many months, how many years?
Not enough. Not nearly enough. Not until Lilia, so close to the end, to finishing everything, to fixing all her fucking mistakes, and Zorya swears, fucking hell fucking hell fucking hell - because she can see the inevitable, she’d done the calculations, designed it that way (a sorcerer strong enough to wield one of the Seven Seals would be powerful enough to be a unit on their own, could slay gods with enough support, but how much could a human give before they give) because she could see the fucking writing on the wall even through all the eldritch whispering and the ashes and the fact that Alexia was going, that she wasn’t Alexia any more (the Seventh Seal had been the last of Alexia’s work, put the last of herself in it), could fucking see that humanity was fucking doomed.
Hope’s a fool’s game, anyway, and it had been so hard to look Lilia in the eyes, pure faith and hope and determination to see this through, to make it right, and maybe even she’d believed just a fucking tiny bit, hah, belief’s a fucking fool’s game, too, faith won’t save you, faith won’t save anyone, faith had been what had fucked the human race, and this was fucking inevitable. Calculations and curves, shitty fucking half-promises that wouldn’t save them anyway, and maybe it might have been kinder to let them all just die, but Zorya’s never been fucking kind.
Fuck the inevitable. Fuck the inevitable. She’ll fucking try at least.
Beneath her feet, the Gate sigils shimmer into life - oh, fucking took the reinforcements long enough- and Zorya only pauses long enough to snarl at their idiot commander that he’s in charge now and she’s going to go rescue the damn idiot girl- and doesn’t even bother to wait for his reply. Not her fucking problem, now is it?
Out past where they’ve dug in, the world is beginning to warp, where the edges of Lilia’s magic only barely touch, trying to push back corruption. Go fuck yourself, she growls at both the second-to-last Wisp - because she is the original, made from a living person, instead of a hollow shell born from the dead, and even limited she won’t allow their power to stand against hers - and the stupid girl who is trying her best to go make herself a martyr.
Zorya punches a path through the labyrinth, fire searing darkness, searing nightmares, until they scream: You’re going to hell, she promises, as she stalks through the maze, murdering every nightmare creature in her path, incinerating them with not even a snap of her fingers, a swing of her sword. There is no Ariadne, here, with her ball of thread, nor a Theseus who died alone and miserable: she’s never played by the rules, not even in a fellow divine monstrosity’s maddened dream-realm. Lilia had followed the path, she can see by the blue glow winding its way through the never-constant walls that constantly shift and change, alien geometries that hurt her head to look at (clinging too much to playing at human). Instead, she simply channels power through her sword, smashes the maze apart: Zorya’s never played at being a conqueror or a riddle-solver, unless that riddle is “science”, but she’s never had patience for shit like this. Especially not fucking now: the world’s warping, but she warps it her way.
(her gold choker burns at her throat, and the memory of her first boyfriend’s face burns with it. For a moment her hands waver, their shape uncertain, before the memory of how she looked the last time she’d ever looked in a mirror reasserts itself)
Zorya smashes the maze open until its heart lies bare, anger fueling her magic even more than her sword is already amplifying it, rips the heart of madness free and finishes the job of destroying it. Lilia - her white cloak and tabard stained red by blood- stands shakily at what passes for the center of the room, white sword driven into the ground at her feet. The corpse of a behemoth lies split open at her feet: light has awakened the nightmare, it’s form settled forever in death, never to change again.
“C’mon, girl.” she says, roughly: Zorya doesn’t think about the remnants of her humanity that she’s burned, the memories she’d clung to, to get here, to try to rescue Lilia, even as her speech sounds strange to her ears for a moment. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Lilia smiles, a half-smile that tugs the corners of her lips up briefly. “You’re late, Zorya.” she says, tartly, as if she’d known Zorya would come for her. Hah, fuck, really? Goddamn Girl Guide.
“Next time, I ain’t coming, girl.”
“You won’t have to,” Lilia says, and her voice is sad, tired as she leans heavily on her sword - and for the first time, Zorya looks, actually looks closely. The only thing keeping her upright is her white-knuckled grip on the sword: her wounds are bad, and she coughs blood. But she’s burned herself out, like Zorya had known she would, given everything she has and more.
Zorya swears viciously - fuck fuck fuck fucking hell- but manages to catch the girl as her knees buckle. Lilia’s dying, stupid stupid girl, dying in her arms like this is some fucking story. Seventeen and dying, seventeen and drowning in her own blood, seventeen and burned herself out. Fucking hell.
“Stupid girl,” she curses, kneeling on the fading floor and trying to remember everything she’d ever known once about medicine even as she knows the inevitable outcome. Stupid, stupid girl. There’s nothing she can do now: even Ilyas and all his healers couldn’t have, not even modern-but-ancient medicine could have, and she fucking hates this. Those fuckers, Lilia’s superiors, had put her up as the messiah: well, now she’s dying for their stupidity, just like she was some kind of actual messiah instead of just a seventeen-year old girl who should never have had to do this.
“..promise me, Zorya,” Lilia coughs, her voice cracking low, eyes focused and intent, even if only for a moment. “After me...I want you to lead them.”
“Girl, that’s your job,” Zorya growls, because don’t you fucking die on me, stupid girl, don’t go throwing that kind of shit on her: she doesn’t make promises anymore, because they always go bad. Mistakes on mistakes, and there’s a thousand fucking things she could tell her, that crosses her mind. Everything she’s held back and a bunch of things she’s sure Lilia already knows. That she’s no kind of fucking messiah, that she’s nothing to pin all humanity’s hope on, absolutely the last person even behind Lilia’s nutter of a formerly-identical twin brother qualified to lead the army or anything like that, never been a team player or even played by the rules, wrong fucking person for all this shit.
That she’s a Wisp, one of the things that they’ve been trying to kill for three hundred years, but the only one who kept her memories and humanity enough to not want to murder absolutely-fucking-everyone, that she’s the one who figured out how to make them in the first place. That it’s all her fault, and all her mistakes, and she can’t undo any of them. But in the end, she doesn’t say any of it: she’s a bitch, she destroyed the world, she doesn’t make promises, but even she’s not bitch enough to destroy a dying girl’s last hopes. Even she’s not bitch enough to refuse to take up what Lilia’s giving her to finish since she can’t finish it herself.
“Fine, girl. You win.” Zorya grits out, clenching her fists helplessly. Five billion people and counting, and all Ilyas’s daughters. The best and brightest of what humanity had left, all gone, and now it’s on her shoulders, or will be. “You better not fucking haunt me about the shitty job I’ll be doing with your army.”
Lilia coughs up more blood choking on what could have been a laugh, silent and racking her frame, and her lips curve upward into a smile as her eyes close, her skin still bathed in steady, calm blue light.
Zorya rests her fingers against Lilia’s throat, feeling the fading beat of her pulse against her fingertips and breathes in sharply, looking down at the girl cradled in her arms. Stupid, stupid, impossibly brave, dead girl, throwing this all on her when all she has left to give is that promise and a secret. Not her biggest, because wouldn’t that be just a way to crush the last of a dying girl’s hope, and even with every other mistake she’s made in a chain of mistakes as long as her life, every single fucking mistake she’s ever made coming back to bite her in the ass, she won’t make that one.
“My name was Alexia Laskaris,” she says, quietly, not even sure if Lilia can hear her anymore and isn’t even fucking sure why she’s doing this because it doesn’t make a difference in the end. Possibilities, maybe, for what could have been, all those doors that just slammed closed and maybe she owes the girl a little honesty, here at the end. Won’t balance out anything. It never would.
One breath, faltering, two breaths, barely more than a sip of air strangled by blood no matter how she fights for it, Lilia’s slender chest rises and falls shallowly, and doesn’t rise again, and the light of her magic fades into nothing. And just like that, Zorya thinks bitterly, for all that Lilia fought her entire life, even fought to breathe for even a moment more at the end, she’s gone, leaving everything to her. A fragile hope and a smile that’s forever frozen and yet another dead girl in a chain of too many, too many dead children and a future that couldn’t possibly be worth keeping now.
Stupid, stupid, brave, brilliant girl, who maybe she could have loved in a few years, or maybe she had loved her more than a little, but it makes absolutely no fucking difference now. There’s nothing left of the girl but an empty shell that Zorya considers for a moment just torching and letting the wind carry the ashes, fuck it, they all go back to ashes in the end anyway, so why not?
Zorya was certain that she had forgotten how to cry when everything truly human about her had burned to ash and memory, long years of being too numb and angry to cry even when the stars fell and the world burned and ended: she scrubs at her eyes with one hand, expecting nothing but dry skin and regret, and finds that she is still human enough to weep.
Story: fragments of stars falling
Colors: white opal (hope), atomic tangerine (doomsday), dove grey (there is a period for hope and one for mourning), verdigris (cryptic marks), halloween orange (There are laws we must obey, certain ways this story goes.)
Supplies and Styles:
Word Count: 2823
Rating: R
Warnings: quite a lot of background violence, child/teenage soldiers and their deaths, the narrator's swearing.
Summary: What happens to Lilia, but not yet what happens after. Sequel to no surrender, no retreat.
Notes: Finally managed to finish this: I've been trying to write it as long as no sweet moment set aside, so I'm glad I did. So also just as rough and uneven in characterization given the long period of time it's been in development hell. This and no surrender, no retreat were originally planned as one story but I couldn't make it work at the time.
skip
I'm not sure whether this would qualify for the season bonus or not given that Lilia dies. On the other hand, given the setting is basically "everything sucks for everyone forever", she's definitely treated as well as everyone else. ...also wow, I am the winner of the "ironic titles" award.
.
They ain’t coming. Zorya bites down the words: no good to voice them, not when Lilia’s doing her best to keep morale up, even though they’re stretched to the breaking point. Fucking assholes, did they somehow forget the meaning of the words “high priority?” Tch. Wouldn’t surprise her if they did.
Her fingers curl around the hilt of her sword even tighter, channels power through it, even as the crystal at her waist pulses with the rhythm of Lilia’s orders - tch, I’ll make you a /real/ radio, Zorya had growled at her, not that stupid fucking magic crystal that shorts out every time there’s too much ambient magic, and it had been hard to see the mixture of confusion and the idea of delight in blue eyes, and Lilia’s question as she asks, how would that work? and Zorya biting down on the explanation of radio waves and growling out instead, doesn’t fucking matter as long as it works, girl.
She hadn’t gotten around to actually making the radio yet, hadn’t even gotten around to figuring out if it’d even work or what sort of power source she’d even try to bullshit into working. Hadn’t been time, what with everything going even further to hell in a handbasket. No shortage of shit to burn, at least, but they’re getting thin.
Zorya’s fine, of course, because this ain’t nothing since she’s so much more powerful than all the rest of them, but they’re human. Humans are fragile. Humans break. They’re holding, Lilia’s holding them, but how the fuck many have they lost? No fucking idea: she burns and doesn’t stop, one-woman army, and maybe that’s why they’re not all dead yet.
Then over the crystal comes the words she never wanted to hear but of fucking course it happened anyway, because it would, - “Labyrinth, preparing to open!”, one of Lilia’s little lieutenants who is trying not to scream in terror and not entirely succeeding. A tear straight into the heart of nightmare, hideous demon conjured straight from the dreams of a Wisp followed shortly after by a flood of more nightmare creatures as the world warped around them.
They’d all die, of course, except Zorya herself, because she’s a tough bitch and there’s very little that can kill her anymore - because if it was so easy to kill a Wisp, even one pretending to be human, they’d be done long ago. If they had more people, more mages on the ground, if those stupid fucking reinforcements had showed, they’d have enough to close the labyrinth without having to make a choice between immediate horrible death and slightly later horrible death.
Fucking hell.
Zorya can sense, even from where she is, the power building, the stability of the land around it eroding. They don’t have the mages to close it safely, the right numbers, and she’s not close enough, she has enough power to do this but can she even get there in time -
Lilia’s voice, clear and calm even now, comes over the crystal: Zorya can’t catch what she’s saying, because she’s shorting out and then gone-
One breath, two, three, surrounded by the sounds of battle and the crackle of power: she can feel the world warping, cracking to let nightmares in: too late to stop the labyrinth from opening, fucking hell, wasn’t like anyone else had enough power to hold the fucking thing closed, and she was in precisely the wrong goddamn place. She swears viciously, flame curling around her fist as she drives it straight through the nearest nightmare creature, snaps her fingers and incinerates another half-dozen, but they’re still pressing in, just before blue light erupts in the sky.
Only one girl with that precise shade of magic: Lilia, she knows, and the dome of the girl’s magic expands outward,clear and shimmering on the horizon, blue and white light steady and pure enough to light up the night bright as noonday sun. And it’s light, not even the lightning storm that is most of Lilia’s high-level casting: she’s skipped straight to the secondary manifestation of her power, tapped levels of power she’s never done before, and Zorya swears, already knowing the inevitable, even as the confused tangle of voices echoes across the crystal.
(humans can’t channel that much power: humans can’t channel that much power for very long and live. she’d done the calculations, when she’d made the Seven Seals in the first place, more than half out of her mind and going further every passing day. the curve between the power it took to even wield one of the weapons, the power a human being could safely handle, and how much was too much before they’d burn out. how much too much was the dividing line between life and death?)
Calculated possibilities, the thinnest curve, the thinnest line: she’d given humanity hope (hah) or the least shitty approximation of it, because hope had gotten them all into that mess to begin with, and it’s another fucking thing she has to live with. That every single fucking human sorcerer strong enough to wield one of the Seven Seals dies, burns out like a fucking meteor falling to earth, and how much time could each spent life buy? How many months, how many years?
Not enough. Not nearly enough. Not until Lilia, so close to the end, to finishing everything, to fixing all her fucking mistakes, and Zorya swears, fucking hell fucking hell fucking hell - because she can see the inevitable, she’d done the calculations, designed it that way (a sorcerer strong enough to wield one of the Seven Seals would be powerful enough to be a unit on their own, could slay gods with enough support, but how much could a human give before they give) because she could see the fucking writing on the wall even through all the eldritch whispering and the ashes and the fact that Alexia was going, that she wasn’t Alexia any more (the Seventh Seal had been the last of Alexia’s work, put the last of herself in it), could fucking see that humanity was fucking doomed.
Hope’s a fool’s game, anyway, and it had been so hard to look Lilia in the eyes, pure faith and hope and determination to see this through, to make it right, and maybe even she’d believed just a fucking tiny bit, hah, belief’s a fucking fool’s game, too, faith won’t save you, faith won’t save anyone, faith had been what had fucked the human race, and this was fucking inevitable. Calculations and curves, shitty fucking half-promises that wouldn’t save them anyway, and maybe it might have been kinder to let them all just die, but Zorya’s never been fucking kind.
Fuck the inevitable. Fuck the inevitable. She’ll fucking try at least.
Beneath her feet, the Gate sigils shimmer into life - oh, fucking took the reinforcements long enough- and Zorya only pauses long enough to snarl at their idiot commander that he’s in charge now and she’s going to go rescue the damn idiot girl- and doesn’t even bother to wait for his reply. Not her fucking problem, now is it?
Out past where they’ve dug in, the world is beginning to warp, where the edges of Lilia’s magic only barely touch, trying to push back corruption. Go fuck yourself, she growls at both the second-to-last Wisp - because she is the original, made from a living person, instead of a hollow shell born from the dead, and even limited she won’t allow their power to stand against hers - and the stupid girl who is trying her best to go make herself a martyr.
Zorya punches a path through the labyrinth, fire searing darkness, searing nightmares, until they scream: You’re going to hell, she promises, as she stalks through the maze, murdering every nightmare creature in her path, incinerating them with not even a snap of her fingers, a swing of her sword. There is no Ariadne, here, with her ball of thread, nor a Theseus who died alone and miserable: she’s never played by the rules, not even in a fellow divine monstrosity’s maddened dream-realm. Lilia had followed the path, she can see by the blue glow winding its way through the never-constant walls that constantly shift and change, alien geometries that hurt her head to look at (clinging too much to playing at human). Instead, she simply channels power through her sword, smashes the maze apart: Zorya’s never played at being a conqueror or a riddle-solver, unless that riddle is “science”, but she’s never had patience for shit like this. Especially not fucking now: the world’s warping, but she warps it her way.
(her gold choker burns at her throat, and the memory of her first boyfriend’s face burns with it. For a moment her hands waver, their shape uncertain, before the memory of how she looked the last time she’d ever looked in a mirror reasserts itself)
Zorya smashes the maze open until its heart lies bare, anger fueling her magic even more than her sword is already amplifying it, rips the heart of madness free and finishes the job of destroying it. Lilia - her white cloak and tabard stained red by blood- stands shakily at what passes for the center of the room, white sword driven into the ground at her feet. The corpse of a behemoth lies split open at her feet: light has awakened the nightmare, it’s form settled forever in death, never to change again.
“C’mon, girl.” she says, roughly: Zorya doesn’t think about the remnants of her humanity that she’s burned, the memories she’d clung to, to get here, to try to rescue Lilia, even as her speech sounds strange to her ears for a moment. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Lilia smiles, a half-smile that tugs the corners of her lips up briefly. “You’re late, Zorya.” she says, tartly, as if she’d known Zorya would come for her. Hah, fuck, really? Goddamn Girl Guide.
“Next time, I ain’t coming, girl.”
“You won’t have to,” Lilia says, and her voice is sad, tired as she leans heavily on her sword - and for the first time, Zorya looks, actually looks closely. The only thing keeping her upright is her white-knuckled grip on the sword: her wounds are bad, and she coughs blood. But she’s burned herself out, like Zorya had known she would, given everything she has and more.
Zorya swears viciously - fuck fuck fuck fucking hell- but manages to catch the girl as her knees buckle. Lilia’s dying, stupid stupid girl, dying in her arms like this is some fucking story. Seventeen and dying, seventeen and drowning in her own blood, seventeen and burned herself out. Fucking hell.
“Stupid girl,” she curses, kneeling on the fading floor and trying to remember everything she’d ever known once about medicine even as she knows the inevitable outcome. Stupid, stupid girl. There’s nothing she can do now: even Ilyas and all his healers couldn’t have, not even modern-but-ancient medicine could have, and she fucking hates this. Those fuckers, Lilia’s superiors, had put her up as the messiah: well, now she’s dying for their stupidity, just like she was some kind of actual messiah instead of just a seventeen-year old girl who should never have had to do this.
“..promise me, Zorya,” Lilia coughs, her voice cracking low, eyes focused and intent, even if only for a moment. “After me...I want you to lead them.”
“Girl, that’s your job,” Zorya growls, because don’t you fucking die on me, stupid girl, don’t go throwing that kind of shit on her: she doesn’t make promises anymore, because they always go bad. Mistakes on mistakes, and there’s a thousand fucking things she could tell her, that crosses her mind. Everything she’s held back and a bunch of things she’s sure Lilia already knows. That she’s no kind of fucking messiah, that she’s nothing to pin all humanity’s hope on, absolutely the last person even behind Lilia’s nutter of a formerly-identical twin brother qualified to lead the army or anything like that, never been a team player or even played by the rules, wrong fucking person for all this shit.
That she’s a Wisp, one of the things that they’ve been trying to kill for three hundred years, but the only one who kept her memories and humanity enough to not want to murder absolutely-fucking-everyone, that she’s the one who figured out how to make them in the first place. That it’s all her fault, and all her mistakes, and she can’t undo any of them. But in the end, she doesn’t say any of it: she’s a bitch, she destroyed the world, she doesn’t make promises, but even she’s not bitch enough to destroy a dying girl’s last hopes. Even she’s not bitch enough to refuse to take up what Lilia’s giving her to finish since she can’t finish it herself.
“Fine, girl. You win.” Zorya grits out, clenching her fists helplessly. Five billion people and counting, and all Ilyas’s daughters. The best and brightest of what humanity had left, all gone, and now it’s on her shoulders, or will be. “You better not fucking haunt me about the shitty job I’ll be doing with your army.”
Lilia coughs up more blood choking on what could have been a laugh, silent and racking her frame, and her lips curve upward into a smile as her eyes close, her skin still bathed in steady, calm blue light.
Zorya rests her fingers against Lilia’s throat, feeling the fading beat of her pulse against her fingertips and breathes in sharply, looking down at the girl cradled in her arms. Stupid, stupid, impossibly brave, dead girl, throwing this all on her when all she has left to give is that promise and a secret. Not her biggest, because wouldn’t that be just a way to crush the last of a dying girl’s hope, and even with every other mistake she’s made in a chain of mistakes as long as her life, every single fucking mistake she’s ever made coming back to bite her in the ass, she won’t make that one.
“My name was Alexia Laskaris,” she says, quietly, not even sure if Lilia can hear her anymore and isn’t even fucking sure why she’s doing this because it doesn’t make a difference in the end. Possibilities, maybe, for what could have been, all those doors that just slammed closed and maybe she owes the girl a little honesty, here at the end. Won’t balance out anything. It never would.
One breath, faltering, two breaths, barely more than a sip of air strangled by blood no matter how she fights for it, Lilia’s slender chest rises and falls shallowly, and doesn’t rise again, and the light of her magic fades into nothing. And just like that, Zorya thinks bitterly, for all that Lilia fought her entire life, even fought to breathe for even a moment more at the end, she’s gone, leaving everything to her. A fragile hope and a smile that’s forever frozen and yet another dead girl in a chain of too many, too many dead children and a future that couldn’t possibly be worth keeping now.
Stupid, stupid, brave, brilliant girl, who maybe she could have loved in a few years, or maybe she had loved her more than a little, but it makes absolutely no fucking difference now. There’s nothing left of the girl but an empty shell that Zorya considers for a moment just torching and letting the wind carry the ashes, fuck it, they all go back to ashes in the end anyway, so why not?
Zorya was certain that she had forgotten how to cry when everything truly human about her had burned to ash and memory, long years of being too numb and angry to cry even when the stars fell and the world burned and ended: she scrubs at her eyes with one hand, expecting nothing but dry skin and regret, and finds that she is still human enough to weep.