Briana stared at her reflection, unblinking, unable to recognize the woman staring back at her through red-rimmed eyes, framed by deep shadows. Her once glowing olive skin had grown sickly and pale, as if a Nether Vortex had opened up just to swallow all of the color and luster from her bones, making the splattering of coppery-red that spread out in random patterns along her neck and collarbone that much more vibrant, abstract paths that lead nowhere.
I must be dreaming, she thought. A terrible fever dream.
She looked down at the formerly elegant rose dress she'd commissioned for Astor’s wedding, how it hung from her frame, reduced to tatters and stiff with gore — wreaking of copper, thick and metallic, laced with something sharp and pungent that burned her nose and lingered on the back of her tongue.
Her hands moved mechanically of their own accord through the necessary motions, twisting the faucet until water spilled from the tap. Every action she took felt as though it was stretched out, elastic and strange. Disinterested eyes watched the sink fill, letting the stream go until the water began to steam and rise in ghostly tendrils, swallowing up her reflection.
Palms turned upward and over as the warm water ran over her skin, noting the lines of red stubbornly clinging beneath the clear stream, how they’d worked their way into the creases of her palms, knuckles, and beneath her nail bed. Almost as if what little remained of Astor was trying to become a part of her, refusing to be washed away and demanding that she carry him with her.
“The system isn't broken,”
Briana reached for a nearby washcloth and began dragging it across her skin, every movement feeling as though she were observing from somewhere far off, on the outside looking in, like her body was not her own. Was this what dying felt like? This disconnect between mind and body? Quiet, hollowed out, drifting? Waiting for something to fill the empty?
Silence.
Except for those words, looping over and over in her mind, digging into her like thorns of a bramble bush.
“It works exactly the way it is meant to.”
Everything was so hazy after Astor had taken that final breath — what she’d said, whether she’d cried or wailed, the moment when they finally took his body away. All she really remembered was the weight of inevitability crushing down against her chest like a boulder and the faint memory of absconding with Astor’s blade, the one he’d so often carried with him, and the cuff-links she’d helped Caerina design — the symbolic parts of his strength and identity that he’d managed to keep in tact and hidden from all the wolves who surrounded him, from all but the few who truly knew him.
Hapes had claimed him in life, she’d be damned if they claimed him in death, too.
The grip on the once-white washcloth tightened, scouring her skin until it was red-hot, until her knuckles blanched white and the water ran pink, until the simmering, dormant heat she’d kept locked up began to unfurl, coiling in the pit of her stomach and creeping through all of the hollow crevices she’d tried to fill — that growing ember she’d barely contained beneath the layers of family, duty, and other half-measures. Astor’s death was the last and final straw, a final tragedy to bring down an already crumbling foundation.
And perhaps this time there would be no rebuilding.
Perhaps, instead… she’d let it all fall.
Let it splinter and shatter, light it all up, and let the fires burn it away until there was nothing left but ashes...
