Akorae: Painful Truths

[Eira]

"It's not fair!" the other wept, and she froze, hearing those words, from another in present... but echoing her own frantic plea in the past.

"...No," she murmured. "It is not fair. The world is never fair."

[Eira]

Ghosting through the dirty stinking masses; she keeps hood pulled low over her face, hiding the amethyst flames. The city, this city, has never felt so alien to her as it does now, not even having returned in grief, begging for the end...

Hands itch to filch through pockets, to run, climb, escape- but there is no one waiting for her. No gang boss, no crime lord, no shadowy protecter to take her in his arms and whisper about how everything will change with just... a few... more... coins...

There is no one left for her here.

Except-

Through the crowd, green eyes are bright. Familiar. Her own eyes go wide; the flames flickering over amber must look unnatural, but this, here, seems like the most fated meeting in all the world, though she knew it was to be. Her voice, tentative, the word fitting ill on her tongue as if unsure the other might accept it- grief, barely concealed.

"...Mother?"

[Eira]

Silence for some time. The words, the most important ones, are difficult to get out. They grate through her throat and teeth, painful in their simplicity.

"He's dead."

[Eira]

The other listened, and finally, slowly, began to smile. "You have been busy, haven't you?"

For a moment, the words conjure up others from memory. There is actually a simple answer, and you're going to hate it. He was right. She hated it then; she hated it now, recalling his phrasing. You are actually extremely special. You are great. You simply do not see it in yourself, because you can only see yourself as mundane.

The memory pushes self-honesty to her lips, for once, along with a strangled laugh. "Without anyone I had to impress, I turned my full attention to other things." Though the words settle sour no sooner than she had delivered them, and she scrambles for recovery. "But it was luck, really. Most of it luck."

[Eira]

"How can I trust myself when time and time again, I am my own greatest betrayer?"

[Eira]

Quill scratches upon parchment, musings idle and transient.

...the height of irony, now, knowing all that I learned in these past few years. I cannot help but laugh to think of how I begged and hounded my father for his help, his attention, any scrap of regard. How terribly desperate was I for his words, even when they were a rebuke to me.

And yet, with all those I have been told I regard as my children, my wonderful, naive, talented, foolish sons- one would think that to ask me for help, which I offer freely and frequently, is akin to taking a lash across their shoulders. Why is this?! How could I, in my youth, be so inept as to need to run to my father's arms at every hurdle, and now I watch my sons tripping and falling down stairs, refusing to even hint that something is wrong.

They do not wish to worry me. I know this. I wish, often, they did not care so much for my well-being; I can take it. To profess any regard for them, I had steeled myself to take any number of beatings to ensure they thrive... and yet?

It is maddening.

Perhaps I am too soft. Perhaps that same desperation for my father, that same desperation for my children to need me is simply weakness.

[Eira]

"You wished to see me in the throne," and she says his name, some knowing lilt to the word. "Do you not remember?"

"I do. And I would see it again. And again. It is your place, for as long as you linger there, and I am nothing if not a slave to obligation."

[Eira]

All she could feel was the blood on her hands, flaking and itchy from her skin, clotted under her fingernails. Blood smeared up to her elbows, across her face; blood spattered on the front of her shirt, staining the white fabric dark.

The feel of flesh torn asunder beneath her fingertips.

Blood coating the stone.

A heart, pierced by blade and put to final rest.

And for once, that fiendish fiddle, the clinking of coins, those eternal maddening whispers... they all stopped.

[Eira]

Stumbling steps careen towards the door and scarred hand presses against it as she struggles to keep upright in drunken haze. But her touch finds parchment, not the normal barely-scorching metal, and with a rustling rip, she tugs it free to read. The words swim drunkenly, though that is a mix both from the one who had written it, and her own bleary intoxication. And yet she reads onward, struggling through every word and phrase.

A tear hits the page.

Then another.

Muffled cry aches from her throat as she stumbles fully inside her room, collapsing on couch to read the letter properly. And once more.

Though tears seep from her eyes, though a ragged sob collects in her chest, the drow smiles.

[Eira]

"That last axe was for him."

[Eira]

"I don't blame you for being bitter. You have been abandoned a lot."

And each time came as less of a surprise. Less of a pain. She wondered how long it would take to just stop caring at all.

[Eira]

"I forgot how young he was."

A pause; she remembers the desperation in his voice, even through his earnestness.

"...And he will never grow older, now."

Not her worst failure, but yet another to linger in her memories until the end.

[Eira]

"His eyes; they were full of wonder. How can I distrust that? How can I look at something so genuine- and think it false merely because we are foes? There was something there, and I wish to nurture it. Even if he turns on me in the end."

[Eira]

"I know what my teachers would say," she whispers, eyes fixed upon the gentle shimmers of water. Even out here, the words are hushed, as if fearing what those long dead or forgotten ears might glean. "...I imagine many would be disappointed in me."

His answer, not a scoff, but she could not blame him if it were. "Do not let yourself be shamed by ghosts. Especially the ones you make yourself."

"I..." she hesitates. "I miss them greatly."

Silence for some moments, weighing her next words, weighing their truth.

"I would take their disapproval if it meant I just had them back."

[Eira]

"Because you injure yourself," he says after an exhale. "Maintain some... base line level of pain you believe you somehow deserve. As if, ah, each one of these people you have brought to peaceable enmity or strange loyalty, somehow offers some abrasive surface against which you can file the edges off your happiness."

She hesitates, both unwilling to tell him he's right... and yet knowing, truly, that he had observed her correctly. Swallowing past the lump in her throat, tone lifts back to lightness. "Yes," she says, simply, as if such an answer could be anything of the sort. "But that is not the only reason."

[Eira]

"All will be well."

Words echoed, repeated, in countless places.

"All will be well."

In the depths of the Abyss, before flickering flames.

"All will be well."

Whispered to herself, alone in the cell.

"All will be well."

Whispered to another, beaten, bloody, broken.

"All will be well."

Murmured in embrace.

"All will be well."

Spat out in defiance.

"All will be well."

His tears wetting her shoulder.

"All will be well."

Each word painful in her throat, yet forced out.

"All will be well."

A mantra for every cycle in and every cycle out.

"All will be well."

[Eira]

Fear almost dried the words up in her throat, almost made her step back, ignore the obvious slight leaving her nameless. A nobody. Nothing. And yet, at the same time, it was fear, as fear always had, putting the steel in her spine, steel enough to square her shoulders and lift her chin.

"Akorae," she says in response, allowing only her wary respect to be revealed in her voice- keeping that terror and the ice it put in her veins, held back far behind her walls. "My name, if you forgot."

She knew the other had not forgotten. She knew the other did not think she was worth a name.

But she said it anyway. Had to.

[Eira]

"For all that I have grown, all we faced, I still struggle not to speak of myself like a broken thing put back together."