Life, Death, and Time - A Books Of Beginning Collection

Oneshot: Conversing With Darkness

Background: Canon, takes place during the time in The Black Reckoning when Emma is held prisoner by the Dire Magnus.

Content: Canon-Addition, Rafe x Kate undertones, darkness because it's the Dire Magnus.

"I'm not going," Emma crossed her arms stubbornly and tilted her chin upward, trying to ignore the way her heart pounded with fear and everything inside of her wanting to cower away from the monster in front of her.

"You don't have a choice," Rourke snapped in response. He looked annoyed, and Emma hoped she was causing him a headache. He certainly made it clear that the task of escorting the twelve year old prisoner was not one he wanted to be given.

Emma kept arguing, because that's what she did. Never stop fighting, punch and kick and bite and hit and never stop until you escape the corner the world has backed you into. That philosophy got her through countless orphanages and bullies, through screechers and dragons and the Countess and it would get her through the Dire Magnus and Rourke too. She would survive, survive so Kate and Michael and Gabriel and Dr. Pym could come for her. Of that, she was certain.

"If you want me to go to his stupid tent, you'll have to drag me there, cause' I'm not going."

"You said that last time," the bald giant pointed out, "and the time before that as well. It didn't matter then, and it doesn't now. Let's go."

Grumbling, Emma shuffled out of her prison. She hated giving in, but she was no use to her friends in a cell, and she wanted to gather as much information from her surroundings as possible, to aid the fight once she was rescued. Unfortunately, leaving the cell to do that meant going to the Dire Magnus's tent, where he acted a strange mix of friendly and threatening and showed her all the cruel people of her past meeting the terrible fates she imagined but never actually thought would come true.

She still wasn't sure why he did it. Was it some sort of psychological torture? If Michael were here, he could tell her if it was, and then he would probably start a lecture about how dwarves were so civilized and never used torture in interrogations or something annoying like that.

Emma missed him fiercely. She would do anything to hear another ridiculous fun fact from him, or to feel her sister's hug, or to see Gabriel looking at her with pride.

You'll see them again Emma, she told herself, just be brave, like you always try to.

Rourke hauled her through the compound and the monstrous army, to the tent that Emma had come to dread. She swallowed, her breathing becoming rapid, for she would run away from this all if she could (and that was hard to admit, because she was not a runner by any means) as she approached the entrance. 

"Come in!" The Dire Magnus, or Rafe, as he preferred to be called, shouted. He sounded friendly and unbothered, like usual, something that never failed to throw Emma off guard.

Nervously, she stepped through the tent flaps. He was at the low table covered in maps, though, to Emma's despair, the scrying bowl had already been set up a few feet away. She didn't want to see what or who would be appearing in it today. 

Rafe looked up from his maps and battle plans, smiling his wolffish, crooked grin, "Hello Emma."

"I'm not gonna help you find the reckoning," Emma blurted out, same as she had the past two times she arrived, like that would do anything. (This was her fourth time in the tent, but that very first time she had no clue what to expect, so she didn't entirely count it). "Show me whatever you want, but it's not gonna happen, and you're gonna lose."

He seemed amused by her blustering, where anyone else on his side would have been annoyed. It was weird, Emma thought, how his army was so fanatical and reverent of him, when he himself seemed so calm in all the chaos, he could almost be mistaken for normal. Maybe it was because his armies worshiped him and became feverous as they did, while he just went along with his plans, assured of his victory, no need for fanaticism because he was the leader here.