𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐒, ᴘᴇʀᴄʏ ᴊᴀᴄᴋꜱᴏɴ

015 ── aflame.

A girl lingered in the hallways crested in generational anarchy.

        She was a shadow along the walls; still, her chest rising, barely. surroundings ebbing to her senses in the pressing of an ode. Flame flickered across the rigidity of the walls, seeping into the cracks, driving the shadow and the whispers to the light. A red afterglow crowning the distance, surrounding her. She did not move. Her eyes were wound shut.

        Thrumming through the stone was a coldness, glass fragments and isolation underfoot. A decade of wrath's viperous swell. Something festered in the roots of this house. Malignant, eating at the blood to come after. Teeth locked into bone, weapons driven into spines. A legacy befitting a rotten, deific spite.

        Theia breathed within the staleness of the space, chilling apprehension settling along the lining of her lungs. Watching. The girl's chiton had been ivory, now befouled and shredded within the remnants of consequence. Her hair, singed, blackened at the tips and frail as it drifted about her waist. What a marvel it would have been, once — spun of the finest bronze, now eroded and dull. A girl worth her weight in gold.

        This isn't real.

        Something glinted off the flares of candlelight, ringing within the encompassing silence. Iron; interlocked around her forearms and had reduced the skin beneath to a reddened raw, pallid with their weight, like a lamb. Vulnerability savaged by the brute, gaudily so; as if her skin was a flay of mockery. A demonstration.

        This one, he had grunted, animal intent and shark teeth when he had seized her hair within his fist. This one is mine, for what her brothers have cost me.

     A girl to bear the price of a city.

        At the shuddered breath ebbing through the redhead's throat, the girl's gaze snapped forward — unseeing, blank, eerie. As sharp and as black as polished stone.

        This isn't real.

She knew it wasn't. It couldn't be, with every archaic detail puncturing and threading through the midst of reality, of truth, a distortion of the distinction. But the girl could see. Theia Harlow's silhouette flamed in the blackness of those eyes, as if the thousand years between was nothing at all.

Theia's skin began to writhe as seconds dragged — fingernails ripping into flesh — and the girl kept her eyes locked, haunting in the firelight, on her alone.

        Her voice was startling, even more so than the dead of her eyes. Congealed anguish. Unintelligible; the words fell swift from her lips. Pink lips mouthed the litany of thread's end — over and over and over. Her jaw began to quiver, the further the words writhed from her chest and her heart like serpents gnawing their venom to the root. Something glistened in a pathway down her cheek.

The girl was statuesque, shattering.

Fate had caressed their fingers along her pallid cheek. Tilted head; accepting their sparse affection. She shunned its condemnation from her shoulders in replacement for what solace they offered now.

Theia inched closer, her brows furrowing within the centre of her head, turning to listen, to wrench the words from the girls lips. To understand.

        She grabbed her, then — the girl's fingers clenched about Theia's wrists, straining to keep hold no matter her yelp of shock. Her teeth rattled within her skull. Fingertips grooved to flesh and burned her memory to the living.

"Dêlios." Theia shuddered under her bruising touch, clawed at her fingers and muffled her screams behind her tongue, but the girl did not stop. Over and over, she muttered until her voice echoed in the caverns and her throat was torn and hoarse and Theia's fingers urged to curl around her lips to silence her tragedy within her throat. Moisture burned her very eyes at the intelligibility.