It was unreal. Rajya was standing in front of her. She was translucent, and kind of green, and fading into mist at the edges, but everything else about her was exact. A part of Marea had been afraid that she would appear as she was in her final moments. An unrecognizable monster, burned to the point of blackening like charred wood, only her horns maintaining their ivory sheen.
Fortunately, Marea did not have to see her like that again. She even looked younger than when she died, closer in age to when she met Marea, twenty years ago. Marea had worried about plenty of other things too, the guilt-font overflowing, haunted by the knowledge that years spent spiting her mom-thing's wishes had ultimately led not to her own downfall, but Rajya's. Everything she had ever said, had ever wanted for Marea. Spit back in her face.
And of course, she wasn't mad. Rajya was almost never mad. She simmered plenty, but not even that vague, restrained irritation was present. Her spirit was like a sweet memory, the most tender moments given temporary form. Perhaps it was because she was summoned in good faith. Maybe it was because Marea was present. More likely, that was just who she was. At her core. Broken by the Legions, by humanity, and reformed into something incorruptible by a life spent living her truth.
Marea draws slowly, taking care with this one. She has few large, thick sheets of sketch paper, usually making do with small journals or pages ripped from books that rub her the wrong way. But she wants to remember this. To hold Rajya in her hands. To hear her voice whenever she looks at it, to remember to not die in an airship accident, or–what was it, not to seek vengeance for Rajya's death? Easy enough. Mouth has vanished again. Or she doesn't know where to look. To be fair, she hasn't even been looking. Sometimes, she just wants to forget.
"So much I could've said," she murmurs, charcoal scratching lightly in the silence of the canyons. It's early morning, the sun just beginning to kiss the cliffs, turning them to bronze. "That dickhead let you go before I could say any of it. But I guess it's my fault too, for not talking sooner. For thinking you'd be mad at me. That was stupid."
Broad strokes for the horns, horizontal and tapering to fine points. Little dark spots for the inner corners of her eyes. Long furs draping off her brows, like a wizened old hermit from a story.
"I'm not as smart as you, Rajya. I can't connect the dots with your work. I'm never gonna finish it. Too much was lost in the fire, and I just don't get it. I'm building a machine to take me to the void on demand, and I don't get it," she adds with an incredulous cackle, throwing back her head and grinning at the paling sky. A ghoulish smile, unapologetically gleeful, sharpened to something more sinister by a lifetime of fear. She'd never think of it as such, though.
"Not that the thing's going to work. I'll be lucky if I don't decimate all living creatures within a fifty mile radius on my first test," she continues, snapping her head down and getting back to work. The immensely broad shoulders, turned inward, as if the charr can't stand to hold up her own weight. The weight of her mistakes, and her ancestors' mistakes. "But at least it's not like the answer to that conundrum is just within my reach. Because it's not. It's a total crapshoot. When I'm trying to be like you, and put myself in your shoes, I just–it's frustrating. I knew you so well. Everything I know, started with you. But I'm so fucking dense."
Teeth like fearsome fangs overhang the jaw. This tooth just one inch long, this one three. The lips drawn up slightly, as if she were about to speak. She might look a little scary.
"To an idiot." Marea completes the thought aloud, moving on to a hundred tufts of fur, and doesn't notice the sound of heavy, measured footsteps behind her, so absorbed she is in her work.
Cara pauses at her shoulder, looking down at the sketch. Her arms folded over chest, hair tightly fastened in its honeyed braid crown. "I didn't even say anything," she proclaims flatly, unamused.
Marea's shoulders jump, startled, but she manages not to send her charcoal askew on the page. "Shit! How did you sneak up on me? And what are you talking about?" She cranes her head back, pouting at the looming woman.
"You called me an idiot. A poor welcome," Cara declares, taking a step to Marea's side and settling down beside her, looking out over the balcony, at the gradually brightening cliffs beyond.
"That wasn't–y'know what, yeah. I did that on purpose. Sure." Marea shakes her head, giving Cara a feeble shove on the arm before hunching over her drawing again. "Kinda busy, if you can't see."
"Rajya. Right?" She asks in her strange way, where it's less a question, more a statement, whether she knows what she's talking about or not. "Are you taking it to her grave."
"No," Marea replies, voice raising in pitch with a bit of impatience. "It's for me. I saw her the other day–just like this. And I want–need to–remember it. I have to."
"Saw her." Cara's brows furrow deeply, turning her ingrained scowl into concern. "Marea. You're going mad. You have to stop with the void–"
"Her spirit!" Marea snaps, throwing down the charcoal and flinging her hands in the air. "Her spirit was summoned by the Krytan Ministry so she could get posthumous citizenship! Be a little more nosey, why don't you, Cara. I asked for it, they granted! Now she can rest slightly more peacefully knowing that the place she called home for two decades is officially her home."
Cara's eyes widen slightly, taken aback, and she shakes her head, looking at the drawing more closely. "Sorry. I didn't know."
"Yeah, you didn't. 'Cause I didn't tell you. Didn't tell anyone! Nobody would've understood." She snatches up the charcoal, but when she goes to resume her work, finds it's nearly done, anyway. She adds a few finishing touches: a softness around the eyes, an angle to one of the ears. She lowers her voice, biting on the charcoal as she sits back to assess the portrait. "Can't really blame them. Government is stupid."
"Government is what holds society together. It puts forth a standard of honor and national identity for–"
"Cara, I do not care about your red-blooded Seraph propaganda. You know what I mean. They'd be like, 'you're dealing with the government just to get Rajya citizenship? She's dead. And she was really a citizen, in her heart. That's what counts.' Fuck the heart. It's just a body part."
"I understand. Being… red-blooded, I appreciate when things are done–properly."
"Sure you do. Suuuuuure," Marea muses, setting aside her charcoal, and looking up at Cara with black-stained lips. "It actually feels good to tell someone, though. Like I wanna celebrate. Rajya spent all those years cooped up inside. Even when the treaty went into effect, and charr started roaming the Reach like it was their personal carnival, she was afraid to go outside. Ashamed. Now she knows, for real, that that's in the past. That–someday it'll be in books like the ones she read. History."
"Optimistic," Cara states, looping an arm around Marea's shoulders and pulling her in close. Marea glances down at it, admiring the toned musculature, the way it dwarfs her own silver arm, as sleek and slim as it was when it was flesh. She traces the swell of a bicep, and lets her head fall against Cara's chest, her gaze still lingering on that sketch. Rajya smiles with that soft smile, a smile that hides a hundred secrets, a life of regret exchanged for a mission of love.
"Weird, huh," Marea finally says, snuggling in closer. "It won't last. But for Rajya, I can pretend. I always did."
A million mistakes, and somehow, she died never having counted Marea as one of them.
Not playing much gw2 right now, but Marea carries on in her latest transplanted form! She fits literally perfect into the cyberpunk mold. Not that surprising, she’s more scifi/modern than she has any right to be in gw2. :P
We’re getting ready for our winter break! ᐠ( ᐛ )ᐟ During this year’s Extra Life livestream we revealed several mysterious pieces of Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons art at certain donation milestones, and now you can download some enormous versions of them here at this blog post.
Please have a happy and safe new year, and let’s meet again soon!
ฅ/ᐠ ‧̫‧ ᐟ\ฅ
“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.”
— Kafka, in a letter to Milena (dated November 1920)
“If one makes no attempt to express the inexpressible, then nothing is lost, but the inexpressible is — inexpressibly — contained in what is expressed!”
I want to write. I have ideas. I open document. I type four of the worst sentences ever created in the english language. I daydream the rest of the scene. I close document.
