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C H A P T E R T H R E E
Daughter of Gestas
Episode 001 (Romance Dawn)
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THE HALLWAY STRETCHED ominously behind her and, had it not been for the morbid silence of the base, she would have assumed penury was seeping into the crevices of her existence with hellish fanfare soon to mark her entrance to the lake of fire. Still, she couldn't help but feel grateful for whatever misery could she face were her plan to go wrong (if filth taught filth, it was only normal it welcomed her back despite the betrayal of having trusted benevolence once).
She could feel her hands shake, fingertips burning and torn after a measly lost touch that brought accidental recognition towards their mutual existence external to delusions of forgiveness. She couldn't fathom how something so banal as a passing glance — a mumbled name that sounded so pious in her sacrilegious tongue that it could have been venom and she would've mistaken it for sweet honey — could have such power over the otherwise undeterred sangfroid of a cunning mind. It made no sense that despite everything (the heartbreak of looking at his eyes again and seeing only reprobation where she had hoped she would always find forgiveness) she still wanted to return to him.
But she was never one to admit to such weaknesses (it required her chest to open until the valleys of regrets and longings were visible to the naked eye, and accepting them meant life imprisonment for the incorrigible sinner).
Sometimes she was ashamed of feeling so alone out of her own volition, but the existentialist in her strived to prove (if only to make legitimate her decision to remain a base spectator of frail beauty, to long for the edge of his ivory sword against her neck) that company had a worthless quality and it was only that which she gave explicit power to that would reign over the sally ports to her right atrium. Zoro was temporal, merely a speck of sacramento in a dark slate to which her eyes would soon be blind, too dazed by the darkness to discern the shapes of his features within the memories that remained; she was a bulwark of corruption who could only seek for the retribution that determined her death to be burning at the stake in utmost isolation for the crimes she had committed.
Wasn't it in her nature, she chided at herself, to merge with the solitude? To envision the shadows, melt within a crevice and blur the difference using Arachne's meagrely careful methods so not even a keen eye could decipher where she ended and the darkness started — that was her only plausible origin and end, the source and demise of the impious criminal in the final judgement. It wasn't to bask in the sun he carried and let him mellow the incarceration set out for her (The Fates had wanted it to be so, she repeated, even if the voice it drowned out telling her she still had time to fix it was much less hesitant, The Fates prophesied she would never be done redeeming herself).
