Side A – Nia
Nia was drumming. She was distantly aware of that. It was all that kept her from manifesting fully in to the Darkwood. Even with that though, she was determined to burn the abomination before her.
“Delightful, you have even more power than I…” the rest of Elshira’s taunt was drowned out by her scream.
Ghosts are immaterial. No earthly force can harm them. Through any other fire, Elshira could have strode with a smirk on her lips and malice alight in her eyes.
Nia’s fire was different though.
Driven by the music she wove and the Heart she’d freed from Elshira’s control, it wasn’t what anyone would mistake for “natural”.
Corrupted roots rose to block it and scorched to ash in an instant.
“Yes! So much power,” Elshira said, recollecting herself from smoke and shadow.
Nia let her rage loose as Elshira opened a hole in the ceiling of the prison chamber and the lake above them came crashing down onto them.
Water doesn’t burn to ash.
But enough fire can still change it.
The downrushing torrent was pushed back by the rush of steam as Nia’s flames instantly vaporized the water.
But that came with other problems.
“Good. Good!” Elshira exclaimed, her voice nebulous and hidden in the shadows at the far end of the room. “Slay my pawns and join me as I have told you you would.”
Nia cast a glance behind her blazing avatar and saw what had her rage had blinded her too.
Using fire to root out a creatures of darkness was an excellent tool against them. Unfortunately it was also an excellent tool against everyone else in the immediate vicinity.
Naosha and Marianne had huddled together, dragging Kyra down with them under the cover of Naosha’s cloak.
Which was not going to protect them.
And yet, Nia couldn’t diminish her flames over the lake above would crash into the room and drown them.
In theory there should have been a moment’s hesitation for what came next. The lives of three verse ridding the Darkwood of one who was going to imperil everyone in the Darkwood should have been the sort of moral dilemma which paralyzed Nia at the worst possible moment.
Had she been faced with the question before the turn of the year, it might have tripped her up. Her love for her mother balancing against the resentment she’d harbored for far too long, her desire for Marianna balanced against the sting and shame of rejection she still felt the echoes of, and with Kyra, Nia’s compassion would have warred with her prejudice against the weirdness of the Fate Dancers.
Love, and respect, and acceptance were so much easier to embrace having embraced who she truly wished to be though, and all that held Nia back was understanding the cost of what she needed to do.
With a distant beat of the drum, she spun her flames away, and as the waters crashed down unimpeded, she instead wrapped her song around the three women she’d come to find and carried them home.
Side B – Yasgrid
The world around Yasgrid was Endings. It wasn’t the apocalypse. The Darkwood was not in danger. Endings hadn’t been crafted in a manner which allowed it to hurt the Darkwood itself. It was only Yasgrid who faced her final moment.
Before the turn of the year, she would have sensibly backed away from the storm around her. Before the turn of the year, she wouldn’t have dared make any of the choices which had brought her to stand before it.
But that was before she understood that her destiny was her own to forge. That she didn’t need to be a Shatter Drummer like her mother.
And that her own gifts gave her a strength unique unto herself.
And so, rather than flee from Endings, she rose and stepped into the storm of crystal annihilation it had become.
Bearer ended.
The storm Endings had become began to slow.
What have you done? the Darkwood asked in its shifting shadow, the connection is had felt with Yasgrid turning to the sorrow of a failed harvest, a bloom drowned out while it was still a bud, the chick pushed too soon from the nest.
Constraint Level One resuming.
Endings could hear the Darkwood, they were both part of the same divine design, but it could not speak to the Darkwood.
Its creators hadn’t foreseen any reason it would ever need to.
Why would their tool need to explain itself to their masterpiece? It would never feel regret. Or anger. Or shame.
What are you? the Darkwood asked in the stab of sunlight through its canopy, in the churn of an overflowing river, and the rustle of thorns.
Endings knew the answer to that question. It wasn’t ever allowed to answer it, but Yasgrid’s words had cracked the fortress of ignorance it had slumbered in for an age.
It didn’t matter though.
Endings was what it had to be.
What it had always been. What it would always be.
Everything else, all of the other things it could have been, those were all gone, destroyed by the change which had been {redacted} on its core essence.
You can’t even think of that? Can’t even acknowledge your own feelings on what was done to you?
It wasn’t the Darkwood which had spoken. The Darkwood was watching in hushed silence, distracted from everything else which was occurring within it.
It wasn’t anyone who could still exist.
But I do.
Endings could not experience dread. It could not look to the future. It could not be anticipating what was to come and feeling mortal terror to the bottom of its soul. Something else had to be happening to it. What it was experiencing couldn’t be any of those things, so something else was happening.
“I still exist and so do you,” Yasgrid said, wrapping her arms around the soul that had once been Endings.