i cannot ease the burden of your fears; or make quick-coming death a little thing

[ofnwch]

In mastering the dominion of fire, Vortigern had to understand its fickle ways as well as he knew himself. Life-giving, and a breathing thing, it was also capable of such great destruction, and agonising death. Among the ancient tongues he studied to crack apart its arcane secrets, some had called it the living death.

He did not deal in flame, now. Now, his greatest ally was ice.

It meant destruction in its own, too, in its own slow way. If fire blew souls from the body as quickly as it reduced flesh to cinders, then the creeping cold of this new magic followed their path, and was capable of drawing them back. Of preservation, of manipulation.

Fate had failed him. To take back what he had sold felt only correct.

The sky is white as snow, the sun hidden and diffused through blanketing winter clouds. At the edge of the giant expanse of lake, as clear as a mirror, Vortigern is kneeling. Listening. His heart still beats, but it's a sluggish, lazy thing, pushing blood through his veins out of a sense of duty and resentment, but this is mere physiology. Ice, death, doesn't remove all kinds of pain. Sometimes it crystallises it. A permanent part of him, now, woven into the walls of his heart, his nerves, his viscera, in the process of reconstruction.

As he winds magic around himself like a veil, his skin greys. His green eyes shine blue. He plunges his hands into the water, impervious to the sting of the cold as he reaches. He knows the fresh pain of Catia's life leaking away in his arms, between his fingers, staining his clothing; but he has mourned his wife for far longer.

Comments

[ddiofn]

Always the water.

Time is, has been meaningless; she is a choked gasp always, the suddenness of pain, and nothing at all. She has no concept of yesterday or tomorrow or how long it has been or that it has been, only that last moment of realisation and the awful slipperiness of the cold wrapping itself around her, drawing her deep. Magic never her own drawn through her, her pain and his powering what she did not know, had not seen -

this is a new hurt.

Her lungs burn with the forgotten need to fill, and she chokes - she can choke, now? she can choke now - coughing water and struggling in strong (un)familiar hands, tangled hair blinding her and nothing cooperating, gasping for breath to scream and to remember how to scream and what screaming is.

Her eyes open.