Outside perspective: Gowry, or one of the less-rotted minds of Sellia, seeing Cotesia survive something horrific.
A hundred lily pods would fall into the muck only for one to bloom. The flower of adversity, all the more beautiful for it.
Polyanna was not that flower. She was the rotted mud that choked out life inasmuch as gave it. The finality of death and the promise of rebirth at the end of decay. She was used to death, surrounded by it, imbued into her very flesh.
She is used to death. And so she remains on the periphery of the Aeonian swamp, as instructed. No more, and no less, half-hewn to a tree such was her stillness. Purpose yet still, though, forbids her death just-so. There is already enough death around her, her flesh is not further needed, not yet. Indeed, so it would seem, has the death of another already been promised. In the fetid swamp, the rhythmic heart-beat of geysers erupting like the earth choking, there was a clash. A Cleanrot Knight, blessed and cursed, spear and rapier in hand, chases down an interloper. Many hues of red slosh against them both, obscuring what was blood and what was not. The only indictment of what perhaps stirred its wrath is that the knight’s armor has been covered in green splotches, fickle poison. Perhaps the interloper’s sole crime was disturbing the knight’s solemn rest, perhaps not, but though granted immunity to the Scarlet Rot, it so seemed that poison of another sort had still squirmed its way through the knight’s armor and stirred its anger. Its quarry, dressed in rags, uses a spear like a pole to vault onto more stable ground, turning to face its pursuer. But the knight is deft, even after all such time unmourned, and brings up its blades to shield itself. The spear bounces off uselessly, and before its prey can react, the knight winds back its spear, now alight with burning holy magics. The interloper attempts to step back, but its bare feet catch a twig and they stumble. Fear makes their red eyes go wide, and it only then that Polyanna detects something is different about this interloper than the rest. But it matters not. The interloper is caught. A bird plucked from the air, spear driven right-through. Then heaved, unceremoniously, across the ground and back into the swamp.
Face down, fingers twitch but briefly. A pale-pink head tries to rise and fails. The knight appeared, briefly, to hesitate. Brought their spear back to the ground to lean heavily upon it, yet sword held ready to finish its work. Death was a certainty promised between the bits of viscera pooling out the wound and whatever else was being dissolved by the gnashing teeth of Rot.
Polyanna is used to death, and thus does not think much. Many have tried to brave the swamp, many have failed. This one is no different.
And then, there is a whisper of something on the wind. The wretched thing, in some startling last gasp of life, wrenches itself forward and grabs ahold of the knight’s ankle, as though death is not a certainty. And then Polyanna bears witness to something she had only faint memories of, as rotted magics, bright reds and soft pinks, err forth in violent wisps up the knight’s body and strangle something out of them. The poison turned to ash in an instant, and with strength renewed and grasp on their spear tempered, the interloper drove it up through the knight’s head through the underside of its jaw. It was as though the dying seed had merely refuted its demise, stole life from the dead within the murk. It was impossible, and yet it was just so.
The interloper struggled onto their feet, holding the bleeding wound whereupon they’d once been impaled and rotted.
Polyanna knows death. She does, she must, death is her sole purpose left. Death was promised to this interloper. And yet she did not die. But the red-eyed woman glowers at her before hobbling off, as if daring Polyanna to contravene her then.
She is less certain she understands.
