[Just a quick written version of an RP that happened recently.]
They'd killed a child.
Evirea had seen many things in her lifetime. Many more yet to come, if she had anything to say about it. Only at the zenith of her cycles, she wasn't seeing retirement on the horizon anytime soon. And she'd seen bodies just like the one lying before her now, on numerous occasions. Yet somehow this one struck her harder than the rest. Perhaps it was the presence of the brand, a perversion left on the young girl that she so dearly wished she could wipe away. As though even in death she belonged to the killer, her body and her soul both corrupted.
People were asking her questions. Gathering around her, staring with equal parts fear and anger at the small nolthrir's small, stiff frame. Their words grated on her nerves, though she knew they meant no harm. That they were perhaps new to such atrocities, and didn't realize that silence is sometimes the most reverent way of being. Still, they chattered all around her, making the inside of her skull ring.
“What was used to kill her?”
“Who did this?”
“Where is the guard when you need him?”
And the tangible undercurrent, the question everyone was thinking but nobody dared utter, ringing unvoiced in the air over and over and over again:
Why?
She answered what she could, but she felt herself floating above it all, drifting. She was just starting down at that tiny face, her long dark lashes, her pale green skin, her mussed, tangled hair. Her fingers traced the hideous marking, the mocking fenki. Her wings hovered over her body and she crouched, looking defeated. But she only allowed this posture for a short time, and then she was rising, on her feet like a soldier, the girl still clutched in her arms. The note left by her murderer still clinging to her clothing, she read it aloud, her voice like the tolling bell:
“Bring me your young, the fruit of your labour, bring me the sweat from your brows. Bring me the precious, your long held favours. All will be righted somehow.”
A silence fell over the clamor, or at least it did for her. Now, every sense, every attention, was fixated on the cold body flung across her arms. And she thought to herself, she doesn't deserve to rot in a pile in the Well, surrounded by the corpses of the old and decrepit. She deserves to be preserved, remembered as something meant to be cherished. Not as a tragedy.
Suddenly, she realized what her rebuttal to the killer would be.
“Teshia!” The woman shouted, her voice parting the silence like a knife. She knew the woman was nearby, and was soon rewarded by the sight of her coming down the stairs towards her, nearing the Den and stopping with a scowl. It quickly molded into an expression of rage when she saw what Evirea was holding, and a slew of wicked curses flew past her lips, her maimed and blinded eye giving a telling flash.
“How deeply can you freeze something?” The klyros asked, her voice hoarse with emotion.
Minutes later a group of mournful onlookers watched as the fierce ylian stood in the city's courtyard, the telling waves of chilling blue way magic wafting over the sparse audience. The air was robbed of all heat around her, and slowly she began to lock the child in place, hands clutching her thin fingers so that she was stuck in a dancing position. On her toes, her arms flung out, her hair dancing all around her head and her shoulders to obscure the viscous mark. Instead of being a symbol of death, Teshia molded her into a memory of life, a mere girl out for a day of play. Noble dwarves and elves who had followed in the solemn procession gathered around and offered flowers, until all the area around the lifelike statue's feet was aglow with the color of spring. Forever locked until someone shattered it away, this would be a momento to what the killer had hoped to, but could never truly destroy.
Evirea sat amidst the flowers long after the others had left, with the fiercesome shadow of Teshia standing over her, arms crossed, poised in the posture of vigilence like a vindictive warrior. Yet the woman, she knew, was completely in control of how she felt, cold like the magic she'd used to create the memorial. And this was one of the aspects she felt was admirable about her. The ability to push emotion to the back of the mind, and walk onwards, until it was safe enough to finally collapse and grieve in one's own time.
She sang a song for the girl, the high, smooth klyran words reverberating around in air that was still chilled enough to make even her breath fog it. When she was finished, she wrote yet another oath upon a scrap of paper, not only as a promise to the girl for whom her heart was breaking, but as a foreboding coming of judgement for the one responsible for her death.
"She mocks you even now in death. Bring me your head, oh demoted one. I shall mount it on a spike and set it high upon the plaza, so that all may rejoice in your demise. She will be remembered with love. You, only with disgrace."
