Discordant Note: Crescendo | TBATE

Chapter 251: Between the Colors

Thank you to my beta reader and editor, GlassThreads!

Tessia Eralith

"It's your fault, you know," I said softly, leaning my back against the cool stone outside the cell. "None of it would've happened without you."

The target of my words didn't respond. She didn't shift or speak. But she never did. Still, I'd been coming down here for the past week, just talking. Accusing.

I tilted my head, my silver bangs covering an eye. "I asked myself why. And I realized... Your people... you had to enjoy it. I don't see how else you could do so many horrible things. Kill so many and ruin so many good things."

People people people, Willow crooned within my core, shifting slightly. Good good good.

I'd said the same things over and over. Maybe if I said them enough, it would start to hurt my enemy. Start to really get under her skin.

But as I chanced a glance into the cell where Mawar was chained, I knew none of my goading words had any effect. The Retainer's pale skin was clammy and sunken from a week of deprivation, her cheeks hollow and white hair disheveled. Yet her red eyes were empty and devoid of inflection.

It had only been a week. Only a week since... since Art—Grey?–-declared himself King. And I still didn't know how to... didn't know if I could process it all. Things seemed to happen around me, fading into the background noise as the world parted like a stream around an uncomprehending rock.

When I was a child in Elenoir, a human merchant showed me a toy popular in Sapin. It was a wind-up bird with a gear on the back that you twisted and twisted, and once you let go, the little toy would bounce and peck at the ground as if compelled. But there was no thought behind the action. It was just that: mechanical. Preordained.

I felt like one of those toys. Every action I took nowadays was like the peck of that toy, driven forward by tension and gears within my soul. My bones were brass. My muscles gears, and my blood oil.

But there was a time when I allowed myself to think. When I gave myself a chance to try and remember being Tessia.

"It's tiring," I said quietly, slumping against the back of the wall. "Fighting all you Alacryans off. Day in and day out. Before you, things were getting better, you know? The races had fought for so long. Even back in Grandpa's day. But we were making progress toward peace. But then you swept in, like a plague."

"We aren't a plague," Mawar said suddenly, shocking me. I blinked in surprise, baffled to hear her voice at all.

I shifted, inspecting the inside of the cell. Mawar turned away, seeming to belatedly realize she had spoken.

Plague, I thought with dark humor, noting how this was the first time I'd ever heard the Retainer unsettled. She doesn't like being compared to the rot her people are.

"You are a plague," I bit back, glaring into the cell. "A rot that creeps up into our healthy flesh, withering and decaying and breaking it all down. That's all you've ever been when you landed on our shores." I laughed humorously as I watched Mawar cringe inward, each of my words striking her somewhere deep in her mana core.

It was so amusingly simple. She'd remained stalwart against all my taunts and words so far. But really, plague?

"Even the men you attacked my family with—attacked my mother with—only served to infect our veins with poison. That's what you did to my Grandpa," I hissed. "That's what you did to my mother."

Mawar turned away, cringing inward as the word mother echoed around her cell. She looked weak, like a chained scarecrow. No longer was she a dark shadow, the same one I'd fought and battled over and over in my nightmares.