Kill Me lol
This moon smuggler, this illusive criminal who carted magic and bronze between every kingdom, the thorn in her side for so long - they’d finally managed to grab a lead. Even better, they’d managed to get someone pretending to be a client, only for Sunisa to take their place tonight, catch them in the act, and then sentence them.
Something in her gut clenched at the knowledge that it would be the death penalty, nothing less for such an esteemed criminal, but this was illegal, harmful, addictive.
That night, Sunisa wore a cloak with a heavy hood, only two daggers strapped to her hips in an attempt to be more covert. She made her way to the meeting place, hidden in the shadows of a building in the Valley. There was the Moon Smuggler, a cloak of their own covering their face, only strands of long hair emerging from the neck.
She pulled out the pouch of ‘gold’ and held it up. “You got the bronze?” she asked.
What she wasn’t prepared for was the way that the smuggler tensed up at the sound of her voice, then darted away before she was even half-done with the sentence. Immediately, Sunisa gave chase, cursing at the other’s speed, wondering how it was her voice that gave it away.
They darted between buildings and through alleyways, through what seemed like every street available. But she wasn’t going to lose the trail, not now that she was so close. The breath was burning in her lungs, but the smuggler’s speed was also dropping, even as they slipped through the shadows.
The running could continue, but there was still a chance that she would lose the other in the darkness of the Valley. Or she could pull out the dagger on her side and wait for a stretch, where she could pause for a moment, and aim, and throw.
So she did, and Sunisa watched with grim satisfaction as the knife landed in their back. The smuggler went down without a sound, collapsing in a heap of cloak and person. Sunisa walked forwards slowly, gathering her breath, before crouching down next to the body.
She was just going to check for vitals and bring them back, but something in her gut made her slow down, made her pull the hood back from their face.
Zoya’s face.
The breath got punched out of her lungs and Sunisa found herself sitting, found her hands checking for a pulse, for breath, for life.
(It made sense, didn’t it? All those places, all those people. The elusiveness, the questions she never seemed to answer. The bitter knowledge that she had to do whatever to survive, and she was good at it. It made sense, so why didn’t she ever realise it before?)
There was nothing but a trickle of blood from her mouth, nothing but cold flesh and a bleeding wound, nothing but another weight on her shoulders, another death on her hands.