Sacrificial Scars | Sunisa & Asif
Time : 994 AL
Location : Mud and fighting and blood
Person : @seraphimslayer
Their company of twenty had charged in with horses, had decimated the village, had torn children hiding behind mothers with frozen eyes and led the parents to slaughter, had followed rumours of rebellion.
Still, the sick feeling lingered in her stomach, the ache of a broken heart still bleeding in her ribs, a pain which had dulled and spread across her body since she had first ridden out. Something within her had fractured and frozen, and her body worked on automatic as she pointed her sword at villagers with nothing and demanded glory for the heavens.
They mixture of Tsuki and Paol soliders had thought they had burnt out the resentment, the agony, the rebellion, so they relaxed a bit, gathering the horses to go back out again. Sunisa was stood in the center, discussing with Asif what to do next, when the glint of metal off the cold sun caught her eye.
She nodded as she listened, trying to focus on what she had seen, but the realisation only clicked when the arrow was flying through the air. There had been a girl, barely ten, her father killed. She must have found his hidden bow, must have taken all of her strength to pull the string back, must have been burning to fire the arrow.
( Sunisa sometimes wonders what it was like to burn. )
The arrow flies through the air, and time slows as she sees the trajectory, as she hears the way Asif continues speaking, as she sees the fury glinting in the child’s eyes. She’s the only one who can do anything.
So she doesn’t think as she cries out, as she reaches forward to push Asif out of the way, as she’s too late to twist her own body away, as the arrow pierces her gut. She doesn’t think.
And then she’s thinking and time is passing too quickly as a sharp pain hits her, fiercer than the ache she had before and she watches as the child’s eyes widens as they missed and she’s falling back against Asif and it -
It all hurts.