"--should have been faster... with the ring..." ( also for lila bc i love u )
↳ try to break my muse’s heart in a single sentence + @avenvares !
there is a single moment of disbelief, a heartbeat during which she’s still one step ahead of the truth. time stops for a fraction of a second, slows as though she used a blood spell ( as narahi, the world stalling itself, holding its breath ). then the truth catches up with her, and she cannot breathe.
❛ no ! ❜ it tears itself from her throat, that scream, a raw, bloody thing clawing its way out of her mouth. she scrambles to her feet, moves in a blur, runs through the remnants of the shadow palace crumbling around them. her mind takes in things one by one: there holland, paler than death, lying curled into himself after falling out of a starburst of light. there rhy, bent over someone else, and for a moment she refuses to think until she catches a glimpse of red hair, pale hands held between dark ones, and stumbles on her way.
lila falls to her knees next to the maresh brothers and reaches for kell, brushes his hair out of his face, accidentally smears blood on his cheeks. for a moment, she fools herself into thinking everything is alright — it’s just the aftershock, it was too close a victory, she still sees stars if she closes her eyes and tilts her head, they’re going to be fine. there is something warm trickling down from a deep gash in her forehead, down her cheek, until her glass eye weeps bloody tears.
if she could turn back time, she would have basked in these few seconds of respite forever, never moving past them. would have kept thinking they’d made it, that they’d won and not still lost it all. that their plans were still plans, instead of ideas brought up on a summer day and fallen into the impossible. ( but fate is unforgiving, and the show must go on, stretched ‘til the very end of the curtain call. )
she would have stayed in the past, and never processed kell’s words, and never noticed his eyes. dear, familiar eyes, both a vibrant shade of blue.
it punches right through her, shock and disbelief and endless loss. the inky black of the antari, the mark of magic, is gone. she never could have thought of something both lovely and awful, until now. those blue eyes are fluttering, as lost as she feels, and for the first time in years, lila wants to cry. but it isn’t done, she thinks, it’s not over, it’s not over until i let it be.❛ don’t be an idiot. as hasari, ❜ she murmurs, pressing her palm to kell’s chest through the rips of his shirt. then, louder: ❛ as hasari. as hasari. ❜ her hands are drenched in blood. his, hers, she doesn’t truly know. her fingers hurt from slamming them down onto the arena’s ground, shattering her own third of the ring. kell’s lies discarded a couple of feet from them. she wants to take it, crush it underfoot and throw the dust into the isle, but she cannot. not for now, while the maresh need her, both need her.
she can feel flesh knitting back together beneath her hand, osaron’s stab wound slowly healing. but his eyes remain exactly as they are, exactly as they shouldn’t be. her gaze jumps between rhy and kell, a little more desperate with every back and forth, until her own gaze blurs with tears. rhy should look better. he should. she wants him to. the bond pulses on kell’s chest, the silvery scars standing out stark against his flesh. she can see the same through rhy’s torn clothes, and every beat feels more and more final.
if kell dies, rhy dies. she loses neither, or both.
my heart is being torn in two, she wants to say, wants to rage. i cannot bear it. you must, someone else says. they sound an awful lot like astrid dane, like her nightmares given a face, given a voice. you must.
she wants to bring them home. use air, carry the two antari and the prince by herself if she must. but there is so little magic left in her, the ache of it like a raw wound, and she’s so tired.
❛ it’s going to be alright, ❜ lila whispers, and hates herself for it. ❛ they’re gonna come and get us, i promise. we’ll get some rest and then leave, like we said we would. i want to see faro, kell. beyond that, and even further, until we arrive somewhere they don’t even know what antari are. but you’ve got to stay with me, both of you. stay with me. ❜ her voice breaks.❛ we’re going to see everything, remember ? everything. ❜ somewhere along the way she slid into place between kell and rhy. one of her arms around rhy’s shoulders, so close she could not tell who’s leaning on who. her free hand still pressed to the phantom of kell’s wound, and his hands coming up to cover hers. kell and rhy’s fingers laced together, clutching so tight their knuckles have turned white. the three of them, three for as long as they can, as long as they have left.
it is how the guards find them, huddled together on the cold ground, bloody and bruised and broken beyond skin. stretchers and questions and words she cannot seem to make sense of crowd around her, suffocate her. there is someone pulling, no, dragging her away - no, you don’t understand, you can’t make me go i have to be with them -, but she’s too exhausted to fight back. the flames she tries to summon die on her fingertips, snuffed out in the space between a breath and another. one moment she’s standing, eyes turned towards the sky ; the next she collapses, a puppet with cut strings.
this is not a myth, they will say later, in the religious tones of the most mysterious stories.
this is not a dream, delilah bard thinks, and shatters.