(no subject)

[creator_raven]

It is not so much a desert of sand, this time.

Mostly there is ice. And rock. And water.

If he were more mad it would almost be like home. Parts of it.

He is very hungry.

But that is not so much something he is unused to.

Comments

[white_flowers]

As he grabs her, as she stiffens in his embrace, the half-illusion she has crafted around herself is shattered, revealing the true horror of her wasted frame. Blodwen snarls and jerks up her hands between them, pushing at his chest and forearm--

--and where she touches him, clay begins first to crack and then to crumble.

The water falls on them both, and with a high-pitched, chilling shriek of triumphant laughter and fear, she shoves away from Raven's now-loosened grip and into the torrent.

[creator_raven]

It would be a slower process were the water not rushing around him, rushing through him, pieces torn away and spun out into ever decreasing arcs.

Were he, perhaps, not merely closing his eyes and letting go.

He is, after all, very tired.

(And faintly, ever so faintly below and within the roar of the waves -- is that laughter?)

[white_flowers]

As it is, it all happens quickly.

The destructive force of her newly-acquired power tears through him like a scourge, transforming strong clay into corroded bits.

As it does, the grip of the curse is frayed and weakened as well. The blood flowing from the wound in Raven's body first slows, then shifts, becoming sand.

The wave recedes, leaving a stick-like figure tossed up against a rock -- but oh, how Blodwen is smiling as she gets to her feet. A flick of her fingers, and she is shrouded in her illusion once more, and laughing.

"A truer test of my strength I could not have found had I sought for a thousand years. So predictable it was, that this dance would be."

[creator_raven]

In the silence after her speech, something stirs.

A heat haze slides across the ground, distorting the air around it.

Distorting the ground under it, sand shifting to glass shifting to flowers and back to sand almost faster than the eye can stand.

It casts a winged shadow.

Lurking at the fringes of Blodwen's mind, Raven-that-was (Raven-that-is) is still laughing, bright and wild and -- warm?

There's a rush as that heat-haze climbs higher, swirling around her ankles, then her knees, heat brushing against her face, against her mouth.

*!*

And then the haze and the power and the laughter are gone.

The sun is beating down on the snow, bright and clear despite the cold.

And Blodwen is dressed in brilliant scarlet, clothes clean and pressed and impeccable.

Call it a gift, repaid in kind.

But not, perhaps, repaid in full.