siri & wolfe | immediately post-battle | complete!
"It is not beautiful or merciful or kind." But then, was that not people's biggest mistake? Faram was not required to be a benevolent Creator; when Siri heard Him she both trembled in fear and wonder. And the blades he wielded, were those full of mercy? Her mind flicked to Rictor, a pressing weight on her chest and an urgency to find him in this chaos.
She turned to Wolfe, "They are out of order like this, will you take them into your gallows until they recant and go home? Better than to have to kill them all."
His lips thinned, trying to decipher this particular piece of madness. The man was tired, his own injuries dragging on him—and much as he’d tried to consider alternate solutions to this paling attack, tried to latch onto the lessons Toku had strived to teach them during the examination, that violence was not always the answer, he still found himself floundering.
“I don’t have any gallows, d’Albis,” he said gently. “I have nowhere to keep them; I can’t, in and of myself.” Despite her eyes telling her otherwise, showing her the wide expanse inside his ribcage where his heart was only half. The bones became roots, the blood thick amber, festering while the world roared inside of him.
She stared at his chest, only seeing the expansion of this world with horror — she snapped and pressed a hand inside (only it came to rest on Wolfe’s chest) and her finger couldn’t reach the gallows. “They’re right there.”
That startled him. The man jerked beneath her touch, a twitch and ripple beneath her hand as if Siri’s touch was electrified, a thunder spell lacing her fingertips, static shock sending him to jittering.
“They’re… what?” For once, Wilham Wolfe was at a loss for words, squinting down at the younger mage. It wasn’t intimate: it was as if she wanted to reach in through his ribs, scrape right past the skin and find what lay beneath, an archaeologist combing for bones. It unsettled him, shifted the foundation beneath the geomancer’s feet.
He felt too exposed under those eyes, as if they saw something intangible that the others couldn’t (the knots and tangles which connected him to someone not-there, a reflection wiped away in the smoke).
And she did want to reach inside and shake that reflection awake, take the smoke and craft someone in his image. “The gallows. I can’t reach them but they’re there, from you, within you, made of you.” Siri dropped her hand, defeated by the reality of the present, unable to touch what she saw to be true.
Maybe one day insanity would be too much and she would tear at the flesh with magic, electricity stunning him into silence while she dug around inside. “Careful with that knowledge, it’s still waiting for its payment.” A glance at his left eye, and she shuddered, snapping shut the door.