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The Summoner’s rebellion was doomed to fail. Some might argue that your intervention might’ve been instrumental to its downfall, but that insinuates that you ever had a choice in the first place. Your entire existence is in service to the whims of paradox space. Free will is a privilege that you do not deserve. And even if you did, he would not see fit to allow it.
Still, you drift through the carnage like an onryō , like the Demoness they claim you to be. Your wanderings are not without purpose.
You find her bleeding and broken and on the verge of death. Verge, perhaps, is the wrong word. Ceruleans, after all, have an abundance of blood.
Nevertheless, she will die. There is a hole torn through her midsection. Her death would be slow and painful, drawn out across the course of several hours. If she’s lucky, she’ll be dead before the sun rises. Serkets are not known for their good fortune. Quite the opposite, actually.
She smiles when she sees you, blood the color of sapphires leaking from lips.
“Handmaid,” she greets, with a voice like rusted nails pulled out from her throat. “Have you come to kill me?”
“We both know I am not the one who will bring you to your demise.”
She tries to laugh and ends up coughing up a fang. “I thought a servant of death could maybe, ah, speed things up a bit.”
You are not a servant of death. An omen does not have control over the events to come--it is only evidence that it is inevitable. You tell her as much.
You watch each other for some time.
Your feet touch the ground. One of them sinks into a troll’s decaying chest. Something crunches underneath the other. Her eyes follow you as you approach.
You set her head in your lap. She stiffens under your touch; you don’t care to contemplate why. She mumbles something about how she’s not a wriggler. You ignore her.
“What,” she says, “are you doing?”
You don’t reply. You just hold her head in your lap.
After some time, she writhes, a snarl twisting her marred face. It must be painful, you muses silently. But as all things do, Mindfang stops struggling, chest heaving.
“Do you do this with all the girls?” she snarls. A trickle of blood leaks from the corner of her mouth. Part of you wants to wipe it away, but you know she would take it as a cruelty.
You hum, run your fingers through her blood-encrusted hair. She twitches again, though you can’t tell if it’s voluntary.
“Fuck you, Handmaid,”
It’s not very creative, as far as insults go, and you have been called far worse. You are a little disappointed. You expected more from a troll like her.
You keep this to yourself. She wants to hurt you. She wants to be remembered by the Demoness, the Handmaid of Death, and you will not allow her the satisfaction of knowing that she already has.
You lean over her, fingers still tangled in her hair. You do not dig your claws into her scalp. You do not pull her hair. You are very careful not to hurt her.
“Her name was…” You stop. She wouldn’t know her name, would she. “She was a slave,” you say. Mindfang does not respond. “She died.” You know, of course, there were many slaves that died under her. “You were fond of her.” You say fond like some would say corpse.
Recognition widens her eyes. She starts to protest, but you hush her. You’re not interested in what a soon-to-be-dead troll has to say in her defense, though this might put a few of your earlier encounters into a new context.
It has been sweeps since then. You do not care if she regrets what she did. You do not care if she has repented. You are not here for revenge; she is already dead. You are not interested in her reformation, in her redemption. You want to remind her of what she did.
"And you raped her." Your hands tighten in her hair. “You were always going to die like this, Serket,” you tell her softly. “In a sea of bodies. At the hand of someone you love.”
She stares up at you, smoldering with hate. You match her gaze with equal apathy. You are not allowed to quadrant anyone. (He made that very clear, in the sweeps when you were new to Alternia. You’d flushed a soft-faced girl, and the doctor made you do awful things to her.) But oh, how she looks at you. You think she could make a fine kismesis, in a world where she is not bleeding out and you are not you.
“Are you always there?” she gets out with a visible struggle. Her face is ashen and her words are slurred.
That almost draws a smile out of you. “No,” you say. “Not always.” Most of the time, but not always.
You’d like to be, though.
You brush her hair out of her face. Part of you wants to get it over with, to snap her neck and leave her corpse to the daywalkers. But you know what the consequence for that is, and it is not worth the doomed, offshoot timeline it would spawn.
Somewhere on the horizon, a wail carries her name to you. Mindfang’s eyes widen and her limbs jerk at her matesprit’s voice.
It seems your time together has come to an end. You lean over her and kiss the bridge of her nose.
“Goodbye, Aranea.”
You leave her for another time, another place, with a festering hole in your chest as the only proof your conversation ever happened at all.