What the Night Brings You

[archiveofarethusa]

Every battle had been fought, and Jaida stood watch at the end of the world. The sky was bloodied high above and the earth was dusty with ash and bone; there were forests still ablaze and mountains ground barer of bulk than the seas of dead, and none of it by Jaida's hand. There was no one left to fight, no one left to fuck, just Jaida left to wander about in the husk of the world, the boredom an oppressive, insistent twitch in her muscles and a pressure inside her skull. Even the cockroaches were dead or burrowed so deep under ground they'd never be coming out. She feared one day she'd crack open from inertia and become a red pond same as everyone else. Some days that was still a better fate than the endless nothing happening.

But whatever had done this had to come back, and so Jaida waited. And she did not wait in vain. A smile spilled across her face, and her voice cracked out, overly loud and gritty from disuse. "I knew it'd be you."

When she woke up, the afterimage of a featureless eggshell head greeted her, but losing the face was no big thing.

She had known who it would be, after all.



Ragnar was no less tolerable as a weed, as it happened. He blathered endlessly about how his roots stretched from Amlaine to the Ankh, how he had drank from the wellsprings of immortality beneath the Whispering Cedar and would someday soon strangle the life from the earth. This was naturally to be taken with all of the salt in the world, as Cyprian happened to know his roots were distinctly average.

"Truly, your heart is as withered as your leaves," Cyprian said, unbothered. Ragnar glowed in smug pride, as if genuinely complimented.

"I will have the world in a chokehold, and it shall be glorious!" Ragnar said. "Since you've offered so generously, I will begin with you."

He popped out of the ground, mandrake-like, and coiled about Cyprian's stem. Having not quite realized exactly how little strength flowers had unabetted by a mystic's magic, he remained for several minutes before flailing in impotent rage.

"And do you plan to also hump the world into submission, or am I regrettably special?" Cyprian said flatly.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you," said the denizen of Cyprian's subconscious that was at the moment roughly Ragnar-shaped.

Cyprian had never woke up feeling half as awkward about his morning wood, and spent the rest of the morning very glad he didn't consider himself qualified to analyze dreams.



For weeks he dreamed of how it might have gone wrong.

Falling, and being felled. Kristen, beaten and broken, too far gone to flee, too far gone from the moment Cliff had her. Sanctuary becoming less than a myth, mercy less than a word. The governor forfending divine tribute and the sun descending, intimate and low, upon the earth next dusk, the blinding white flames sparking earthbound as Daldain caught fire and blazed for years as it was said Cassini had centuries before. It was this one Cliff found himself trapped in tonight; the heat licked at his reddened skin more hotly than real fire as his fingers curled round the red of Kristen's dress. He knew by not-quite-memory that she had died earlier, burned alive in some far corner of the city he never had a hope of reaching even before it had all been ash. He looked up and her eyes were two plumes of choked smoke, her hand on his head a brand as her fingers dug into his skull and browsed through him as if he were a library book. Cliff was still beneath her. Every finger of flame accused him - and it seemed they all pointed towards him.

That wasn't why he knelt, however.

Cliff woke up, and Kristen's fingers remained, cooled of hate and gentle at his hip. He watched her for a moment, still tense even at rest, and placed his hand over hers. There were no eyes to see, and even if Kristen opened hers he had nothing that wasn't hers, too.

"I promised you I'd make you happy," Cliff said. Kristen's brow remained furrowed. This was the best he could do.



High above the city of Daldain in a room less than a handful of people know of sits the woman who watches and wars in and with the shadows. Once she was called Kristen, at first because a daughter called You would have caused talk about town, and after that because it was a honeyed name, sweet on the tongue and rich to the ears. She is seldom named these days. The man at her side - because she cannot imagine this man anywhere else, doesn't want to - has a surplus of names, but none dare speak them in his presence, as if their absence would make him someone else. It never does. He wields a sword that is purely ordinary, and it is that sword that has bled Daldain pure and well again; for when the woman in her invisible keep speaks a name, the man could slash from continents away and strike the heart of the named. The street stones are still red with the dye of those the woman has named, but it isn't blood, of course. Demons do not bleed. Mothers still cry, but without anesthetics removing any abscess will result in pain and tears. The important thing is the women are free and the pimps and the murderers and slavers cringe like frightened children at shadows. Daldain is becoming clean.

There are eyes burning into her she cannot see, the ghost of a hand dragging promises across her wrists and hands. She seeks out her man after a few moments he turns and smiles, comforting and possessed, his hands at work whetting his sword. The touch at her wrist is cold, she realizes.

It's not a true nightmare, for she isn't scared. Kristen has never had one. Kristen has, in fact, never dreamed before tonight. But tomorrow she will dream again. And the night after. Soon she will dream her too vivid dreams and wake remembering enough to carry them with her out of the shadows cast by the moon, some fantasies beyond imagining and some very, very real, but there are always the eyes, the hands.

She wonders if she should worry.