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❛ holy water cannot help you now. see I’ve come to burn your kingdom down. and no rivers and no lakes can put the fire out. ❜
— seven devils, florence and the machine
in a strange, intangible way that could never be explained, only felt, this is precisely right.
the cloud cover obscuring the sun and casting the sky in stern grey. the roar of the broken, lowered drawbridge. his father astride his warhorse not far to his left. the gleam of the blade as it refracts the low light when he lifts it.
the imperial army pours in like floodwaters cloaked in black, and there’s that shock of red at their forefront, an emblem wreathed in dirtied gold, triumph dragged up from trampled corpses. he’s never begrudged her — a soul like lightning, cleaving its own path. that feels right.
there’s nothing right about war, but this is. there’s nothing beautiful about gnarled bones, the spray of a severed artery, a caved-in skull — the vulnerability of one man, one blade. but there is in the certainty of a moment hovering as if on a knife’s point: the old man close by; ingrid a fortress away; dimitri, sylvain, all of them, even farther, so far they couldn’t stop him, couldn’t see it. he’d never have to try to explain, could carry this singularity with him regardless of how this all ended.
( he’d never believed in fate. not once. )
but something incomprehensible touches him at the sight of her: teal and savage light. something about her has always felt like still waters. he realizes that the reason he’d always loved watching her on the battlefield is that he can’t get enough of the suggestion of life that teems beneath a tranquil surface. her, there; him, here. blade to blade. that, too, feels right.
❝ part of me has been waiting for this since i met you. ❞
( and that thing he’s never believed in will forgive him if he smiles, if the words are more like a prayer than any he’s ever spoken to hallowed stone. )
it would be disrespect to meet her with anything other than brimstone and flint. ❝ no need for chitchat. come at me! ❞
when that sword in her hand glows with phantasmal force, when at the end of their final bout, she comes alive to herald his death, his scream swallows rodrigue’s cry of his name. the sky hangs like pale fire, swimming in embers. he never was able to thank her, to tell her that he had found the answer to the question she’d posed him years ago. at least not out loud. but perhaps he’d done so already. perhaps, with his last, choking breaths, he has the audacity to believe she might have heard anyway.
these ivory walls, truly hallowed, are what he could never explain. he used to wander them over and over again, a labyrinthe to walk in his sleep. now, they would return to the dreams of their birthplace, and he with them.
and that, also, feels right.