Cracking the Dam [Poison]

[Mara]

Page after page of journals, the ones his father kept meticulously. He must have leafed through them hundreds, possibly thousands of times. They were sheets, endless sheets, of medical discoveries, procedures, and fact in such definite detail that he had needed no further coaching besides the experience of repetition to attain a hirable level of training. So then how could it be that not a single entry was about her? Atric alleged to love her; Mara was reminded every day of the man’s fixation of her death. An inner cynic, his alone, scoffed. If there was ever anything it had been blown away as miniscule scraps of slag once the fire had consumed their belongings. A fire he had set on a drunken blunder. Only the journals he had knowledge of, he saved.

'Brave' his esophagus squeezed around the word struggling to swallow it whole. The same could not be said of him. Mara had run. In the face of his perceptibly troubled father, he had run to the farthest place he could think to go, and away from the one person-

He stopped himself from treading any farther into that thought, his hand chafing along the arch of his palm were a crest of vines and leaves loitered beneath his peel. Marvasa veered away from their intersecting look as he felt the abrupt transformation that would bleed the mahogany color from his eyes into a pasty shade of violet. It was humiliating, especially in the company of those that did not share this phenomenon of a dilemma. It was still difficult to hide or pretend when your body betrays you so naturally. It was cruel even, when the Symenestra knew all too well how to compose themselves, and he had learned apart from this one acquisition. He could no more betray this than trembling in terror or a nauseated babble of deprivation. The half-blood pushed past, gathering his contemplations in a pile that resembled the one he kept his life in: structured and well-defined.

"Viratas has my thanks then, if not my love for caring for her and in the last ten years of her existence, lengthening her life because of it." His vision crawled across the walls of the sanctuary and the smooth stone as if addressing the god himself if he would care to listen. He wanted to ask more about it, Viratas. What was Daratur's relationship with the god similar to? There was yearning in him to know more, but his tongue wedged between his teeth in the pursuit of another matter.

"You read her writings I’m sure.” He peeked toward Sarya absently waiting for her to either confirm or deny that she had indeed done as she said. “What was there? What was she going through?" his brows pinched and then relaxed as the question brought him back to their conversations aim. Guilt now rode him for any bitter feelings still bubbling in his gut, but his vision now reluctantly pooled with scarlet once again and he felt the relief wash him over.

OOCI know I haven't been here in far too long. I hope you don't mind me returning to this. Also my apologies for my absence.

[Poison]

„Would you maybe like to thank the god personally?“ Daratur asked. „Would you like to talk to him about your mother? I cannot promise that he will answer, but he is always listening.“ He knew – or could at least guess – what the halfblood was going through, knew about his inner turmoil, but he chose not to comment on it, at least not now. Instead the priest of Viratas looked at his assistant. It was her turnt o speak now.

„I’ve read her writings, of course“, she confirmed. „Senesea was an outsider. Few people understood her. Some shunned her openly. She was insulted. Most people would have become bitter because of that. They would have become violent. But she didn’t. Senesea was only kind. She never hurt those that wanted to hurt her, never insulted them, but tried to make them see her point with logicial arguments.“

„But she wasn’t a martyr. She left before it became too much. She wrote about some of the things her parents said to her. They thought the fact that their ancestors used surrogates had weakened her, that the human blood had tainted her.“

She stopped, thinking, and then she shook her head.

„I’m not sure how much I should tell you. Some of the things in there are … painful, more painful than what I’ve already told you.“