[PK] Hindsight Parts the Veil.

[Isvinity 729]

Spoiler

 

 

“I don’t pretend to know how he comes to haunt you. But if he walks the night,

then I will, too. I’ll keep watch. I won’t let him come for you – not while I’m here.”

 

 

 

Hope is a practice. Hope is a discipline and Orsina is well schooled in it, so adept to its various different shapes and edges. Hope is the light breeze, sweeping through Caurost and rustling the golden leaves; hope is the trickling of fountains, and the bell-like laughter of elves from around Aevos, staying or visiting; hope in the shape of a lover cradled in her arms. Hope is... looking into the mirror and seeing a hundred years flash before her eyes — eyes that search for another pair of cool grey in the past.

 

They are hard to find now. Time and distance has washed those eyes abroad. Still... her heart seizes at the sight of grey, like their forefather is gazing, from beyond the ages, back at her.

 

When Orsina rose this morn to the first ray of the sun, she did not expect to find yet another shape of hope. She thought she had learned them all, and how foolish she was for it.

 

Swathes of mali’fenn lay their eyes upon her o'-so-softly like foam on water. Orsina suddenly can't breathe. Her lungs filled with a wetness that expands, and she must hold her breath lest she drowns in its vastness. They are proud of her. They needn’t sing their praises – she can see it in the crinkle of their eyes, which, too, hold a melancholy she cannot place. Her legs tingle, threaten to turn into liquid. She feels utterly unworthy.

 

But I lost all of you! she wants to cry. I couldn't find you, and I stopped looking… Hope stung her, then, too. Everyday felt like the day that she would again see that familiar assembly lining the streets, no longer a scattered people. Reunification was always the goal, and she threw herself at the pain, day after day, until it would no longer take her, until she let herself walk away. I should've stayed longer, tried harder, searched further... it is childish, now, to want to cry out and be consoled and forgiven. 

 

Hope is a physical pain; Orsina feels it tearing at her like a familiar animal. Her people had been there, all along — all that carnage and blood, all the death and loss and defeat and triumph... and all this burden of pain, they could have – should have – shared it.

 

“You were… you were here, all along?”

 

She is startled by her own voice. It sounds steady,  regal. Ages of discipline has schooled her into this, this strength that can hold herself upright even while she feels like crumbling.

 

All these years, she thought them lost, to her own carelessness or her weak will, but to know that the most of them had been mobile and lucid, and simply chose not to be found...

 

Collectively they turn. Streaks of white hair under the southern sun, putting their backs to her. Turning on her.

 

“No!” Orsina cries out. Her hand moves before she can stop it, and she seizes one of the faceless elves by the arm, harder than she meant to.  “—don't leave! Please...  I am sorry I failed you. I should have known...  I should've noticed–  I should've tried harder, or known better. I have seen and learned, all these years... I swear– please stay... let me prove it, give me a chance… let me prove—”

 

Her cheeks grow warm. She feels something twist in her gut as Aldred’s form shimmers before her. He takes her face into his hands.

 

Oh, she thinks. Another dream I cannot wake from.

 

“Listen to me. You did not fail.” Aldred would impress this upon her a thousand times. Again and again until his dying breath, if necessary. Perhaps it would be merciful to deny her, to turn away and close the chapter, but this facsimile of her uncle finds himself lacking the strength for such cruelty.

 

His eyes, dark with the weight of ages and grief unending, lay gently upon her. “I shall stay a while, if you wish it. To know you again, your home, your family… would be an honor.”

 

There is an absence that lingers. A third that is missing, and the space he left will always remain hollow. Hindsight parts the veil draped over memory and mind.

 

A sadness creeps into Aldred’s faint smile. “But my body and mind both are weary,” he confesses quietly. “I feel the doom upon me. I would not have you see me so.”

 

“You look well,” she argues fondly, adjusting the lay of his cloak. She moves forward, into Aldred, to embrace him –

 

– but her next step tilts the world. Where she expected solid ground, there is nothing.

 

Darkness everbodeing in the place where time does not yet turn. Ere the sun. Ere righteousness.

 

Oh, she thinks. A dream I will not wake from.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It sinks down upon her, then. She has failed.

 

 

 

 

 

Malevolence writhes against the barrier of good within her. Solomon's enmity is infectious.

 

 

 

 

 

At the end of her life Orsina swims in a thick, pungent ocean of pain and delirium. Hate rots her from the inside out.

 

 

 

 

 

A brush, light as a butterfly's wings, ghosting over the rotten scars of her eyes, draws her from the endless black.

 

Strange.

 

Orsina stirs and tastes the early eve's frigid air, feels the caress of a mountain breeze. She remembers then – albeit slowed by the heavy hand which now held her mind and soul – who lays beside her. Nysis' affections might not have stilled, had she not raised her hand to trace her lover's cheek.

 

By the dawning light of Iker'fiyem they lay languidly upon a large stone-carved bench cushioned by wool and fur. The pavilion above protects them little, allowing the winds to touch them freely. The falling snow reminds her of something vital: to never become stagnant. Yet, in this moment, any movement takes a greater toll, not for pain but for the desire to remain but a moment longer in this world.

 

“Are you in great pain, my sun?” Orsina asks quietly, muffled by his dark head of hair.

 

“Moon-kissed,” he answers, his voice a distant and fading echo, “I will live. Do not worry.”

 

“I do.”

“Do not. Go easily – for all you have endured, you deserve at least that.”

 

 

And so she went.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet, even in death, the princess' purpose turned anew.

Evil beheld her corpse, and together they stalked the realm ...

 

[Holyland 3650]

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

The bindings of chains could hold that rot no longer, then; the Penitent did kneel, with legs wrought of soot, in a cage fashioned of his own making.

 

The digits; they tremble, not in trepidation, but in insectile delirium. They await it, in frenzy.

 

"Isini iknebian p’irvelebi."

 

"The first."

 

So smiling, then, is the visage of the wretched Absolute.

[_Leyd 1010]

A thousand worms sought to devour a corpse to no avail, for it must have remained impervious & pristine. 

Bones are plucked from broken feet and crushed into a paste, blood is drained causing the eyeless woman to grow pale, and in all his humor, came a waning light. 
 

“How long did you rot?”

“Four days.” 
“How long will she?”

“For eternity.”

Her flesh became canvas to a hundred eyes, each etched with meticulous precision, her hair a crown wrought of worms and marrow.

Her fingers fused together to form a pyramid, and her gut was pinned thrice from unholy steels.

 

“Do you think my nephew would be proud?”

A voice, though not his own seemed to ask.

“Your sin is your own, Prophet.” 
Silence took the formless pair, and the embalmed corpse of that woman was paraded through hell itself.

[Axelu 4333]

Elsewhere, the Princess of Tahu’lareh mourned. Her only child, taken by forces beyond comprehension. The stoic elfess relinquished any composition. That evening, a shriek stirred the Northlands. 

[Nimbus_Strike 271]

The death of her princess was, unfortunately, not known to the estranged mali'fenn animatii engineer, who now spends much of her days in quiet meditation outside of her daily routines of training and potioncrafting.

 

Even as her heart was turned to the flames of the All-Father, a part of her still wished things could've been... Different, for her kin. And for everything. Yet still, does she pray for her estranged kin, to their health, well-being, and success in their endeavors, even in all her obliviousness, and as estranged as she was, both in heart and faith.

 

Yet... It was too late for her to act.
 

As it always has, and will.

Edited October 9, 2024 by Nimbus_Strike

[Nectorist 12869]

"Certainly she's just busy..."

 

Yet four years of those assurances, each more grasping than the last, have worn thin for Aldred. War in the east, and the need of his wagons, has kept him tied away from Caurost, yet even on longer absences his niece's letters had always reached him in a month or two. Each stop along the trail from the crusade and back means a new post office where her belated letters could hopefully be found.

 

Each stop means a tug of pain on his heartstrings as he sees invoices, business correspondence, news, but not what he wishes to see most: the smooth, flowing calligraphy of Orsinia's initials on the top-right corner of the envelope. Hope will never elude him, not so long as he remains ignorant of the truth, but with each blank corner he has to force his thoughts to trail away from the worst.

 

"Maybe the roads there aren't safe enough to carry mail..."