🔮
see into my muses past! send 🔮 and i will write a drabble of a memory that your muse gets to see into.
A curious filament floats in the orbit of a blue planet, nigh invisible in the field of debris despite holding a fragment of light within itself, slowly darkening from one end onward to first a dull grey before flaking into something like rapidly blackening ash. On touch, it dissolves—breaks down to glittering dust and evaporates, leaving behind nothing save a sensation of searing pain and dull determination. A memory.
... ... ...
His heels rang against the invisible ‘floor’ of the Court’s seat, an impossible, echoing sound in a place built to enforce utter silence. The presences he could taste there—old courtiers, new hopefuls, those who simply needed to witness—grew still. All attention on him.
He was painfully aware of it all. The unblinking gazes looking for any sign of weakness. Any indication of the white-hot agony within, of the still-ongoing struggle to assimilate all he’d consumed leading up to and during the coup. The worst may have been over, suffered in hiding near his heart, but that only reinforced that to most present he was a nobody. Risen from obscurity as if buoyed by some great cosmic joke.
As if it hadn’t been because none of them would.
He took measured steps, noting the now-empty and half-broken cage-like pagodas along the vast expanse. A flicker of attention, a flare of white-hot pain flashing under his skin, and every time he passed one it would crumble to a single pinprick of matter just shy of dense enough to count as a celestial object of its own, and fly to his wake.
A foolish exertion all in all, but he was here to make a point.
One by one he released the Blades from his shadow, the beads of his predecessor’s creations slowly forming strings of blood-black pearls connecting them, like dark wings. They still thirsted for his life and hated him just as much as they had in the hands of the Deceiver. But they were the trappings of her power, and so would need to be his.
Finally, he arrived at what remained of the Deceiver’s throne. A lavish, decadent nest of finery more akin to a bed than anything else, and still faintly stained from the lifeblood she’d ended up spilling and he hadn’t bothered to collect.
Unlike the cages, he took his time with the throne, reducing it to a swirling orbit of dust—the effort filling his vision with nonexistent lights as he wielded power than still fought to consume him instead of the other way around. But finally, after a time of a length he wasn’t sure of, in place of the lavish nest he’d formed a sturdy, bulky and distinctly unadorned seat.
As he sat, something like a whisper rippled through the halls, something akin to acknowledgement and fear in the nonexistent air. They had witnessed him. Seen him weave power with ease even bursting with the light of undigested firmament burning beneath his skin. Some would step up to challenge him, in time. Most would acknowledge their better. As painful and aggravating going through this theatre had been, he now was Sovereign and could start digging his people out of the pit the Deceiver had cast them into.
Because someone had to.
