Heart of a Diamond: A Rakta Diamond Story

A Chance

It had been a little more than four years since that horrible day. Rakta had felt every second of it, the memories carving themselves over and over again into his already flayed and tender mind.

The months, weeks, days, minutes... they were each their own separate hell, tiny and infinite. They were his punishment.

They were entire lifetimes spent without a heart.

Rakta could feel the way they hardened him. The way the time had calcified his very being into something made of stone and ice. He cared for nothing; there was nothing to care for. He was little more than a bloody ghost that drifted from room to room in Heart Castle, making the slaves and courtiers alike nervous whenever they caught sight of him.

He hardly spoke. If the Queen demanded something, he merely nodded and did as asked, regardless of the task required of him. He answered direct questions, but beyond that, he held his silence.

Tamsus, in all that time, had spoken to him only once. Rakta had woken in a strange, dark room, his leg splinted, bandages covering the majority of his body to look up and find the other Ace watching him from a chair across the room. The Heart's Ace had risen upon feeling Rakta's gaze and said, "She's in the garden that had the poppies. At what's left of the castle."

He'd then left. The only times he'd engaged with Rakta after that were when the Queen ordered a beating because Rakta had slipped up and let his true feelings show or when the Queen showed the Diamond Ace too much preference and the jealousy that defined Tamsus left Rakta bleeding.

Two weeks ago, Mavros had forced him to renew the Oath and the words had burned just as painfully as they had a year ago. The gap in his chest widened further, shearing away anything good in him little by little.

Soon, Rakta knew, there would be nothing left inside of him. Not even rage or pain. Not the insatiable need for vengeance, the desire to see the Queen's blood gush over his hands. He would be nothing and no one.

Even Avinos would have been unable to recognize him.

As had become his wont, Rakta was wandering the castle and its grounds, trying to find some balance between remembering who he was and avoiding the memories that threatened to tear him apart, piece by bloody piece. He had steadily made his way from the rooms the Queen had given him that faced the far north, down through the busy halls and corridors of the castle, out a side door and into the too warm garden of the Queen.

Rosebushes dominated, the blooms in the exact same blood-red shade all around him. There was no deviation, except in one lonely corner that Rakta had found months after waking up in the Heart's domain.

He missed the chill of the north. It never snowed here, so close to the western jungles. The only thing separating them from their torrential rain was a thin line of the Dark Forest. For this, Rakta was grateful, even though an obscure corner of him missed the somehow smoky scent of snow.

Snow would only ever bring him back to two memories. Two lovely, heartbreaking memories, cast in moonlight on a small balcony far away.

Rakta could ill afford to spend those memories every time the weather turned, which was why he didn't care that it was too warm and humid here. He needed them for when things were desperate, for when he was too close to actually forgetting.

Eventually, he knew, they would wear away. Like a painting left in the sunlight to weather and fade, his memories would die slowly, until they left him in nothing but darkness. Until he was beyond saving.

Redemption was out of the question. He just hoped that whatever powers had put him on this earth would allow him one brief moment with his princess before he was sent to his fate. That he could somehow manage one last defiance against the Queen that would allow him that small grace.