The last thing that she remembers is that she can’t remember a thing. Cold, cold eyes, feeling like nearly hundreds staring back at her, predicting every move, every possibility. Even she, master of illusions and strings was seen right through in the end, him humoring her for a little bit, letting her feel like she’d scored some gastly blows, but in the end, it was a ruse and to be that thoroughly was an experience, humbling, that she’ll never forget in her life.
Three had fallen, one beheaded, another skewered, a third in a pool of his own blood. Kirio was thin and would not last long with the rate that she was burning, supporting them both. But then…after that, she can’t recall.
She didn’t see herself where she’d fallen, arms disintegrated into dust, lunar crown shattered, white robes stained red with thick and viscous venous blood. Nor does she see how it smears behind her when she’s unceremoniously dragged. Death does that to people, you know. She bled further onto the pallet she was hoisted on and brought into recovery, and from the time and heat she’d lain there, the smell is rancid, noxious and somehow stale.
She certainly didn’t see the body of the man lying in the cot next to her. And given that a dead person gives off no reiatsu…he probably didn’t notice her either, just another one of the corpses…and perhaps given his recent penchant for reanimating them, maybe that was for the best that he wasn’t in good shape either.
But then, off in another room, someone else is restored, someone with a power that she now loathes, even though it will revive her in every sense of the word.
Her name is spoken. Her true one. Not the title of Senjumaru that she’s masqueraded under for the past few thousand years, but the real one that nobody’s said to her face, probably not since her parents were last alive. And with that, life comes flooding back, garnet eyes flash wide open as her heart restarts, and thus reiatsu begins to flow again, and without her consciousness to regulate it, it blasts in all directions.
It’s painful, and she yells, more of a growl mixed with a scream, an unearthly sound. Circulation being restored to nerves that now scream from damage, lungs re-inflating against broken ribs, every bruise pulsing, along with the splitting headache from the swelling delicate tissues. Grasping for the side of her pallet that’s been laid upon a cot, she weakly tilts herself just in time to vomit hours old bile and acid and blood that’s collected into a free-flowing stomach with relaxed sphincters on either side onto the floor beside her, with a violence that she didn’t realize her shaking, flimsy muscles were capable of. And then, when she is certain that she is several wretches past the point of having no more left to heave, she lies back to gather strength.
It’s only then that she’s aware of who’s beside her. She’s been so distracted by the matters of her own suvival that she’s forgotten to do the first thing that any assassin does when she enters a room--take stock of her surroundings. So, she does the only thing that is truly befitting of a moment like this.
If there is anything in this world that Shutara knows, it is that though this universe is steered by an uninterested clockmaker…but still, there is a sense of humor that colors everything, and to her, no matter how many times she’s revived, the absurdity of the world she protects will never get old.
She glances to the side. They’re both vain creatures, and she wonders who looks worse now, him or her. Her gaze is warm. Deep care oozing from her soul for a pet project. The one thing that will save her and let her walk free in the end. Well...if he makes it through every trial.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she says, the playful music in her voice. She can’t help her heavy-handedness. It’s how she was born and it’s how she will always be. “Though I figured that with my standing, I’d have been at least given the dignity of a private room.”
