hollow victories || open
Above her the sky stretched on, infinite and eternal, and where once it would have given her comfort, on this night and in this place it seemed as if it served only to mock her. The stars glittered, fragile and broken things, ghosts of what they had once been, remnants of their former glory. Their light was the glitter of coins placed in the eyes of the dead in an expanse that taunted her with its closeness, with its immaculate and boundless existence. Ghosts and shadows. This was what she had been reduced to. A single life, in a single time and place, bound to a form that was not her own, constrained by moralities that were not hers, for the care and consideration of those few in this world that mattered. It irked her, beyond measure, that she found herself ceding to their wishes… his wishes. They had condemned her to this life, taking her power from her, reducing her to so much less than she had been, and she had endured. She had attempted to abide, to exist, to accept what it was that she had become, and then… it had all become naught. It had become irrelevant. Wesley had died, those that she had stood with at the battle in the streets of Los Angeles had, in time, drifted from her, and she from them. She had no place with them, without him there to act as intermediary.
There was little left to her in this world, now. The winds of chaos and the seeds of destruction had been sown long before her resurrection into this form, this time, this place. Now was the time of the harvest. The red harvest, the tide of blood and death and violence that would sweep across the world. Given enough time, the ground would be stained red with it, and all that would be heard were the cries and screams of those afflicted and perhaps, then, the laughter of those that stood upon the mountains of flesh and the citadels of bone to overlook their masterpieces. And through it all, and into the next age, she would subsist. Existing. Immortal and unchanging. There had been a time that she would have reveled in such a world. A time when she would have destroyed all that stood in her path to achieve the highest throne. To conquer all, and never die. Now, even that thought left an emptiness inside of her that she could not explain — or perhaps, that she did not wish to. It was not enough. And yet the fight… it called her still. It had drawn her, like the irresistible ebb and flow of the tide, tugging her to the place where the cracks were most evident.
And now… now what? That was the question of this moment. Of this night, of this existence. The building was like any other in this place, walls within walls built of stone and mortar and wood and steel. Cages within cages. Its only advantage was its height, allowing the greatest view of this place, this city named Mystic Falls that she might, in this moment, survey what would she suspected in time become the shining star in the crown of whomever it would be that would reign victorious when the ash and fire settled. She crouched, silent and unmoving on the edge of the rooftop with little regard as to whom might observe her in turn. Perhaps, in truth, she longed to be seen. To be discovered. The silence, once comforting, burned at the edge of her consciousness, painful and omnipresent.
