>>6320488[roll failed]
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Her voice lingers. It seeps into your chest, that vibrating note of—yearning.
Like a crumbling bridge, its stone tongue rattling one last time into the void, a cry for all that was lost.
Perhaps, for a instant, she has considered it, and the idea that your presence and your words, you who are the least of all Knights, a failure, a country bumpkin, a doofus and a puppet could make the Stilladìa shake like that…
You purse your lips, and reach out for her shoulder. Your hand brushes against her naked skin, smooth, save for the tiny cracks oozing that painful light.
But the moment has passed.
And it will not come again, in this or in any other age of the world.
“Now, look,” she prompts you. She opens her eyes once more, the light illuminating the bent shape of Bragia, holding onto her lover, his breaths stretched thin, a rope about to snap.
Her one green eye awash with terror.
She bites her lip.
Then, as if listening to a voice only she can hear, Bragia nods. The last flower from the festival, which held onto her brown hair out of some miracle or perhaps stubbornness, shakes off and falls into the current, to be carried away forever.
“Ahh… ahhh!” She shrieks in pain. Her other hand jerks towards her face, but no, she pushes it back to keep hold of Helias.
Bragia blinks. Blinks again—her eye is still green, but she looks at the bloodied arm that she pierced her beloved with. Her skin is turning dark.
Bit by bit, it burns up into a tanned hue, then umber, the rich shade of Kiengir that was lost from the world when Ansàrra destroyed the old order.
And now it’s clawing its back into it.
One side of Bragia’s mouth twitches.
[cont.]
