Rockette

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Beach - Dundas Islands, Pacific Ocean.}

Human #5.009: the children of sorrow.

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_{Interaction(s): blackjack & eclipse.}

Previously: her remains.

Stephen Anderson didn’t understand why Scylla was so determined to return the belongings of the dead, near-obsessive to obtain personal effects to sign and hand over to family members; answers met with acknowledged fear and hopeless truth; children sent across the ferry to learn, grow, to be safe in like-minded graces away from the world that would never understand them otherwise. When he asked, watching her turn that damned ring through her trembling fingers, she muttered with glassy-lined eyes of silver that she would want someone to do the same for her, to find the remains and allow them to be given a final rest for life undone. Peace, she breathed, that they once had here- it wasn’t always like this, she muttered and curled her palm around the ring once more, holding it close as if cherishing the discovery. He didn’t bother asking her again after that; he couldn’t really blame her for not recognizing that he would follow her onto whatever path and endeavor she forged, only desiring her safety above all else. He had family back on the mainland and offered her his home. His mother would welcome her happily, he said, but Scylla had merely shook her head and denied the comforts proffered; there is more I have to learn, she claimed, more that I can possibly do.

So Stephen decided to go to The Foundation, too; he would not allow her to go alone.

She took that ring and made inquiry attempts to Ryan about Amma’s family, which was met with an eerily drawn-out silence until she admitted quietly that she didn’t have any. All academic records of Amma Cahors had been taken and destroyed and were suddenly missing, plucked so carefully, and done so thoroughly. As if she did not exist, for someone had meticulously seen to extract any trace of her, her room in shambles, her belongings taken, and now any lead into her past suddenly not there. There was no next of kin, Ryan had explained, her mother’s whereabouts lost to time, her father unknown, only the mutterings of spires of a church in Rouen where she was born being the only knowledge they possessed. The Cahors name was so loosely spun through fate and was now suspended over the dregs of never-there and used-to-be—a chasm of both Charlotte and Amma, mystery and wavering shadows betwixt their shared likeness. Torres would’ve been the next person to ask, maybe the one to give such a sentiment to, but news of her death had spread fast, and Scylla (anyone really) didn’t know Amma Cahors well enough to look further into where she had come from.

Giving such to The Foundation just seemed wrong.

And perhaps that was why Stephen and Scylla found themselves on the beach, watching from the edges of browse and sand, the hazed figures of Blackjack and Eclipse set off into the distance with a smothering air of uncertainty and woe worn as a blackened cowl. There was enough chill that Stephen took his jacket and allowed Scylla to slip her trembling hands through and pull taut over her shoulders against the cold; her white-blonde hair pulled up high from her nape, green eyes bruised and troubled, and tired. He knew exhaustion pinched and buzzed through his own amber gaze, black hair crazed and shoved under a baseball cap. They would be leaving tomorrow, and various fires scattered down the beach revealed many who were also enjoying their last nights on the island. Somber music that plucked through the night, bittersweet laughter and cries, Scylla and Stephen had stood on this beach not long ago lost to sand and surf and sunlight. Team Raindance, 08, their brand as a simplified rendering of a water droplet that they wore as necklaces, given that day for all the years they had spent together.

Under the moon, such a once familiar tradition was bathed in the finalities of silver shadow, melancholy that writhed as lamented cloaks of loss attached to every figure she recognized as the infamous team of Blackjack. There were few left of their own team, a couple she spotted further down, waving them over. Most were returning to their homes, and she couldn’t blame them for such a choice, no matter if such wrought her heart through and through—she didn’t want to be alone.

In the pocket of her jeans, the ring weighed like a stone, and every step grew more and more cumbersome as she trekked, Stephen at her heels, an immediate shoring of his guard as she stumbled, listing to one side where the ring burned beneath the fabric and seemed to shudder in the presence of those gathered. The lingering pieces of conversation fell upon her ears as they came closer, Stephen carefully holding Scylla at his side, hand around her elbow, steadying her through the cumbersome sorrow she wore, courtesy of her powers, everything profoundly felt and doubled. His own abilities cried and sang in their electrifying summons, purple hues of energy with pinkish undertones shimmering through his eyes as Scylla greeted those gathered and said:

“We don’t mean to disturb you,” she began in a whisper. “I’m Scylla Fluerane, and this is Stephen Anderson from House Gulo.”

“Team Raindance,” he tacked on carefully, unable to keep himself from studying their profiles, the injuries sustained, and the pain they must’ve felt.

“I—we—I just want to say we don’t believe all the rumors. No one really knows what happened that night.” She shook and trembled but carried on with a soft sigh. “But that’s not why we are here. I’m leaving tomorrow for The Foundation. " Why she felt compelled to admit such, she did not know, but nonetheless, it was out there as a plunked stone.

“We are,” Stephen amended, holding her all the more, and nodded for her to continue even when shock lapsed through her speech– gazes held for a long moment before she returned her silver-lined eyes to the fire and those surrounding it.

“But we found something in the dorms, one last look through; I don’t know if any of you have been there, but everything is gone. I don’t know what happened. No one knows anything about her; there’s no next of kin, nothing that Ryan could find, and –”

“Scylla.”

“Right, I’m sorry. I know what it is like to be… unwanted—never seen. And I don’t want that for her. No one deserves that.” She carefully reached for the ring in her pocket. “It seemed only fair to give this to you, her teammates.” In her delicate fingers, the jewel of red centered there seemed to glow as it captured the light of the fire, flames reflecting and licking off the bronze and golds twisted there, shimmering in the malformed and curious make, such a mundane thing that swelled with the profoundness of its discovery, the only token that remained of the infamous girl taken that dreaded night. Scylla glanced at each member of Blackjack before her green eyes landed on Gil, the last person she witnessed with Amma at the dance– would he want such a thing? She pondered who else would accept such before approaching the celebrity and carefully dropping the ring into his palm; if anyone else had reservations about such an action, Scylla ignored them in favor of whispering.

“I’m sorry.”

“We also encountered something else, though I don’t even know how to describe what it exactly was,” Stephen carried on next, glancing down the shoreline where the remainders of their team beckoned. “Something evil; we assume that’s what maybe tore apart her room; they blocked most of it off, though. People are cruel.”

“It’s too bad The Foundation couldn’t find the deed; at least we’d be able to stay here. This place is a home to so many of us.” He carried on, offering his hand to Scylla next as she stepped away from Gil; her body lightened as soon as she passed the ring onto another, a sort of easy calm spread through her to know that those who knew her best would see to its safety now that she was no longer here.

“Maybe we’ll see each other around,” Scylla uttered with a soft farewell hung upon her words as she slid her hand into Stephen’s grasp, held tight, and allowed him to lead them down the shoreline one last time.

At least they’d be together from here on out- for now.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Pacific Royal Collegiate & University - Dundas Islands, Pacific Ocean.}

Human #5.002: her remains.

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_{Interaction(s): &}

Previously: &

When Scylla Fluerane had returned to the Gulo Dorms after an unsuccessful convincing of her peers to attend The Foundation with her (for where else could a bastard child such as she return to when all record had been shorn and torn and lent to fire by her father), she had been met with objection and garish yellow tape spun and crisscrossed over the grounds, a smattering of security personal in place that had effectively turned her and many others away, their belongings scattered and haphazardly obtained with a pending investigation over obliterated windows and the entryway shattered from what she could glimpse by pressing inward, struggling, pleading to at least walk through the halls one last time. Six years on the island that she called home destroyed and left for naught, oppression felt in tangible waves as she clutched a flier betwixt her trembling fists and fought against the encroaching loneliness that threatened to take her under.

How did she do it? She pondered, that hated blue-eyed woman who once looked upon Scylla and scoffed, laughed, and tore into her friends when they attempted to befriend her with hateful words curled into French notations. The waspish woman that laughed bitterly into the encroaching dawn when she had been introduced to the dorm, something feral and edged in brutality that garbed her as unworthy to don the Wolverine of their house, that shield undeserving for her graces when she had strutted about the campus in mocking ochre embellishments against those tattoos and scars. That same woman assigned to such an infamous team that the campus was often swept up with, various inquiries regarding what exactly happened left unspoken, and prying eyes and proposed theories hushed or ignored. Scylla wondered how someone so involved could be so alone; every morning and evening met with silence in the last year she had attended, and every passing month more profound until the day she first saw her with such a sad smile.

Stories circulated, and implications sired among them, the transfer student, the looming Foundation heralded on lithesome shoulders and sheared through eyes that Scylla could still feel from when she last spoke to her, their weight so keenly felt, after the trials when she simply asked her if she was okay. (Ryan had designated her to assist in gathering some of her belongings, and had also been tasked with gathering sentiments for families who lost a beloved child in the most recent attack) The haunted look, the despair that feathered around her as horrid shadows of malcontent. Such madness loomed behind blue eyes as a glowing hellfire of demented retribution: she had heard the stories, everyone had in some shape or form of grandeur, but she had seen the truth lain bare that day and the following days with whispers abound. Uttered occurrences of her involvement with her teammates, descension from the most critically acclaimed blackening of her name that some cursed:

I heard she slept with Lorcán Roth and Gil Galahad.
I heard she stepped out right before the Trials late at night; who’s to say she wasn’t a part of that too?
I heard she attacked the hospital staff, and they had to chain her to the bed.
I heard she attacked some of her own teammates!
I heard that the gargoyle came for her and –

Chernobog!

Good riddance! Ever since she came here, everything has gone wrong!

I heard she stole –

I heard she killed –

They say that –

They say she was dragged into Hell.

-Maybe that’s where she belongs.

The rumors and stories had been vicious, but Scylla had seen her on the dancefloor, the way she danced so carefree, wild- so unbothered, and just as she was in that moment: a girl who was simply enjoying life as it was given and taken under moonlight. She had seen her in the arms of Gil (and who didn’t notice him! A celebrity in their midst.), and though she had left early, trapped with some others in caves of frigid ice mere seconds later - she rubbed against the still healing cuts and bruises on her arms - she had seen and felt the crimson waves of wrath and ruin.

She had heard the screams.

No one deserved such a fate.

In the final afternoon that she would spend on the island, Scylla and a few others had been permitted to look through the Gulo Dorms one last time to gather possessions that may have been left behind, and what greeted them was an eerily carved path of destruction through the commons and then above, a clear and designated path of something that reached the third floor, and there she stood with a gasp, palm against the heated breath that she fought to control as she looked upon the remains of Amma Cahors' dorm, eyes rounded out in shock.

The door had been left as nothing but splinters and massive spires of wood lain as spikes littering the carpeted floor. A scrawling of various slurs and profanity had been marked into the walls, scrawled in ink both black and red, lines gouged into the paint to lay blame as a memorial of a cursed wrong and death. People needed someone to blame, and what better method than that girl who walked through life as the harbinger of rage and darkness, as an in-between creature of this woeful life adorned with her agony of fate undone? Scylla fought around the terrible shudder that worked through her nerves; the gruesome defilement of her room was an omen to be sure.

The world is never fair for the different, for the misunderstood. For simply being not-as-we-should.

“That’s fucked,” someone whispered, voice lowered as if afraid to speak aloud, the yawning pit of the shadows that lurked yonder torn and smashed remains seeming to writhe despite the filtering of sunlight through shades torn askew.

“Why would they do such a thing?” Scylla breathed, arms folded around her middle as she stood in the ruined doorway. “She’s dead; can she not rest in peace?”

“People are scared, Scy. Sometimes, it’s easier to take it out on… Well. It’s just easier.”

“They never found a body,” someone else muttered, and Scylla shuddered at the mere though of it. Maybe she was really dragged off to Hell with that thing?

“It doesn’t matter,” Stephen Anderson proclaimed, a Gulo senior who found the sentiment in wandering these halls one last time a balm to the uncertainty of the future ahead. “This is still our House, and someone, many probably, broke in and decided to do something so hateful.”

“It’s not really our House any –”

“Then leave!” Stephen snapped, “Enough is going on here that I doubt anyone would notice you gone anyway.”

“Steph, I didn’t mean–”

Scylla allowed their arguing to fade off, stepping into the destroyed room on whispered steps; the immediate entry suddenly hushed and stilled, as if stepping into Amma Cahors' old room was detached from the reality in which they floundered. Everything within had been shattered or toppled over: drawers ripped open, bedding torn and shredded, a vase of dead flowers thrown and cracked into glittering splinters. All of her possessions had been taken, nothing left in memory of the raven-haired woman and the walls here too defiled and marked, crude illustrations of what appeared as a scaled beast on one side, blackened lines viciously drawn on the other, pools of red left to stain the carpet, still wet and gleaming under the hazed rays of the sun. She shook with the wrongness of it all, the barbarism, the –

Something shifted in the darkest corner.

A writhing and coiling swatch of darkness, of shadows, something black that festered and oozed as a void of nothingness that all manner of light could not penetrate nor touch as it lay there winking in and out of existence, to and fro, as if struggling to remain as it was with sobbing wet edges that bled into reality.

“Scy –”

“Do you see that?”

“What -” Stephen came up beside her, stilling at the pulsating mass, shuddering under the weight of the unseen, a sickly sound of boiling manifest, a squelch of liquid matter that writhed and rose, a gaping maw of a fiendish appetite that yawned forth and suddenly wailed with its appetence. A screeching horror that sounded like the symphony of the lost and the forsaken, eerily reminiscent of the screaming they had heard just a few nights before. Scylla immediately fell to her knees, palms held against the assault on her very senses, ears ringing, bleeding, torn asunder as the shattering cries continued, tumbling over one after the other as a cacophony of deafening hate and ruin. It sluiced forward, crawled, webs of ink peeling forth on membrane-like creation that thinned and snapped and bled, and Scylla looked upon it with desperate fear until hands grasped her shoulders and hauled her back, every inch gained only so much and paling in comparison for the thing that writhed and tried to reach her, inches away from her sneaker-clad foot as she scrambled back and back and back, palms slid and slick with red as she slipped and fell, once, twice.

And then there, a wink of gold, a spark of crimson, something small left alone and forgotten just underneath a shattered bed.

“Scylla!”

She lunged for it, clutching it preciously within her grasp before she scrambled back and ran. The alienated knell of decay and rot was hot and heavy on her heels as they rushed outside the dorms, the world eerily silent and beholden to what they had just witnessed that failed to follow them out into the sun, unable to form it into words or reason as Scylla held out her trembling hand. Her palm cradled around twisted bronze and golds, a malformed design, an all-seeing globe, and the precious red jewel set there.

The only possession known to remain of Amma Cahors–her mother’s ring.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

Do you think they'll just simply let you go.
The world outside of this perfect little bubble is cruel and it is dark and it is afraid. Afraid of you. Afraid of me.
They lie in wait to take everything you hold dear. And they will.

They always do.

But no matter what, this world will never accept you. They won't forget.
They haven't forgotten. I doubt they will ever forgive.

Many years ago, in the darkest of pits of a netherworld embedded with agony and despair, where no light could reach, and the symphony of the lost and forsaken reigned true, a little girl was left alone, lost and bound, and chained and broken. She no longer cried or screamed or begged; at barely thirteen, she had been peeled apart over and over, sinew and flesh and bone maimed and scarred, wounds so deep they festered as conceptual cesspools wrought with her hate. The depraved that were sheared of their humanity and left as mere tools, as a means to an end, weapons forged under the machinations of immortality and eternal renown of a man who challenged the might of the universe on the whims of madness and horror – thickly drenched in blood, the shedding of innocence found in the hateful eyes of blue that glared through tears and anguish and swore to destroy everything in her path.

She cursed them that day when the needles pierced her skin, when phosphorescent hate took hold of her very heart and pumped it full of sin forged of wrath, the burning, the pain, the glowing fire that wrent through every nerve and summoned the creature within that wailed and roared with the sorrow of loss; for all the wrong done unto her for many years to come. He took her name out of spite the next day. He breathed life anew through flayed bones and blood, marking her as the mother, the creator, the one Made for All, the epitaph of a bestial goddess that took the form of a dragon, a great winged serpent that made the world as it was and would later be fated to destroy it.

On her nape, the first marks to lay, a brand that would forever go unnoticed, even years later, as she stood as the harbinger of ruin, lain with black and red and silver, marked with scars and horrid creatures and eerily beautiful moths adorned with the face of death. A mask reminiscent of a sorrowful beauty, the most devastating with bared teeth and feral smiles as the devourer for all the world to reap and sow.

And though vengeance she swore, there was no denying the acceptance of the price that she had paid, the choices made for all the power in the world to find those in life known as mother and father, keeper and creator, the laments of God and love and hope that she was bitterly denied because the world saw her as she was and forged chaos through her soul of souls when she was born. The unification of all sundered under the might of the sun the day the Earth stood still.

There in the dark she had laid, a cell within a cell, the end to a long hallway strewn with corpses and flickering light that fell in tandem with a shattering heart, every plink of glass and stone as she swore then and there never to yield herself to anyone ever again. She took that weighted fear and sharpened the edges to brutal efficiency; marked her broken soul and spirit with it, carved the name taken from her there, left to wonder, lost and forgotten for many years to come until someone she knew naught yet would receive it and speak it aloud to rebuild her want of love anew. To be known as Beloved, taken from the place of the in-between as the creature, the beast, that would sooner tear apart the very fabrications of reality so that she might never know this pain again - held within a cage of bone cracked and splintered, beholden to the crown that would impale the brow of a raven-haired child with scarred palms held high as a sacrificial lamb.

In the dark, a hand had forged through, a simple offering to the child marred with scars, a beautiful smile that bloomed and held her there. A girl who, too, suffered under the blades and cruelty of life, skin marked and pocketed, likened to chips in mortar and healed over in patches of black. Eyes of a swaying meadow that held hope even in the shadows of their pain, haunted and yet brimming with silver tears as she whispered that she was okay, that she would be alright, and that this would not be her end.

She gave her name that day, her hand then too, as the first person to reach forth and hold her hand as a scared girl rather than a being to be tamed. Palm to palm, ashes to ashes.

Hey, what’s your name?
Tiamat.
No, the one they took from you.

Ammar –

No, someone had said, denied her truth, and whispered into the shadows unbound:
…Ummu-Hubur.

She gave her life that day, too, as the first person she ever killed.
Dust to dust.

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_{Location: The Augmented Reality Center - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, Dundas Island}

Dance Monkey #4.085: tiamat.

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_{Interaction(s):&}

Previously: taste of blood.

Please.

Amma Cahors held Harper Baxter on high, scarred palm against her throat, cinched tight, and trembled with the might of light undone. Her eyes pleaded with the girl in her grasp as tears continued to fall unchecked, smeared and wet and carved betwixt blacks and golds that ran down her face and fell onto the terrifying manifest of her powers that fell around them. Crackling energy within a sphere of thirty-three feet as the world held breath on the awakening monster that carved through flesh and spilled torrents of chaos into the void on a demented throne carved from the chasm of the deep where shadows malformed and brewed, where Amma’s true heart remained forever lost to the tides of fate. A heart maimed and faded, her name lain there for so many years, taken from her, never meant to be her own.

And then he said it: he protected and defended her. He put himself before her as no one had ever done before, reaching within the dark and yanking her forward into the light of hope to be as she was, as she could be: just a girl, a human, instead, to love and be loved in return. To mend, instead of sunder. How he knew, she didn’t know. Within the eclipsing shadow of her rage and depravity, there thrived a whisper of light, as if a holy gleam had broken through the darkness, a shimmering veil of amber-yellow that lingered as a wisp of yearning for the truth hidden deep and yonder obsidian walls that she threw herself against. No one had been there to save her then, no one to reach into the pit of black that frothed and churned as the sea, no one to pull her free from the chanting ruin that had sent her entire body ablaze with sheer agony and memory of all that she had done.

For all that she had yet to do.

None had ever fought for Amma Cahors; none had fought for Ammaranthe, who lingered as a child before the shimmering glass of a window in that church that shined darling twilight upon her – waiting for the one to speak her name. For the one that would step forward in defiance of the world and those that would take her back down into the dark, for the one that would name her friend and know her deepest fears as their own, for the one that would pray to the good that had withered and died long ago and remained as a kernel of lingering secrecy that none could see. To the one who denied she was a monster, to the one who would look upon her and see the beauty of her soul rather than the ugliness it carried through this life.

What did they see? Who?

She sobbed his name and yet laughed around the stinging bite of nails into her wrist, so minuscule and insignificant compared to the slivers marked into her back that suddenly burned.

Please.

She throws Harper away from her and throws herself back, too; she stumbles and gasps and struggles to breathe around the terrible weight settled in her ribs; she swears she can hear and feel her bones breaking, every rung jerked forward and cleaving down her front where the scar on her chest writhes with whipping crimson coils that spill shadows of a putrid rot pulled from the depths of a hellish world on the tides of this prophetic summons. She fists trembling hands through her hair and sinks her palms against her eyes that continuously weep where her lips peel wide in a horrid screech of all-consuming fury. She claws against the voices that peel through her head on the cries of her past. For every life she had taken under the moniker of Tiamat, the confines and locks on more of her memories threatened to burst forth on rusted hinges where they had been cruelly contained, eyes of many colors that bleed and blame her with bitter distrust and hate.

She steps back again, once, twice, slipping over ice and blood until she falls to her knees, the skirts of her dress spread around her as torrents of energy cleave through the world and decay around her body; the sound they make is an obscure droning that drums a funeral tole for the hopelessness witnessed here as Amma struggles against the manifestation of true hate and pain.

She peers through her splayed fingers, eyes cast on high, every tear spilling over as a build-up of the many years that she had been denied, for every facet of life taken from her, the injustice of time so hell-bent on marking her as different and misunderstood. She takes in great gulps of air, panic sluicing away through her veins as fire and ice, knowing she cannot stop it, knowing that her defiance and will would last for only so long. Her hands trembled, her body shook, and her back arched on a sickening crack as every single scar she bore began to glow before her powers slowly turned inward and struck; every pale line snapped open, skin peeled back, every wound and horrible thing she had endured suddenly experienced twice over.

Amma screamed. Her wails of agony pierced through the terrible violence, another gargling screech as she realized it was Gil’s body tossed so viciously, the savagery of his clones destroyed, or was it his actual remains she kneeled in, the sickening warmth staining the paleness of her skin, her own blood seeping down and down, lined over black ink as her scars continued to flay themselves open on whips of scarlet destruction. Her screams turned vicious and horrid, such primal sounds of the human heart that shattered with every beat, the kind that punches up from one's stomach and rips through their chest, the hopeless thought of loss and death that she carried, puncturing through her lungs on every scream torn from the pit of her soul.

Gunshots, metal, bone, and blood all amalgamated into a terrible ringing sound as her powers continued to expel around her. It was too much; it hurt. Everything hurt. And she just wanted it to stop. Amma wrapped her arms around herself, cocooned within the screeching sphere of crimson energy that sparked, sputtered, and roared, decaying lines of black and silver that splintered out from her form bent over, cleaving through everything in its path. Fissures broke through the ice wherever her powers touched, random shoots and tendrils of scarlet launching away from her and landing where they willed themselves to go, hissing and screeching with the overwhelming surge of ruin as within the swarming barrier of light and darkness Amma, Ammaranthe and Tiamat waged war.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Augmented Reality Center - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, Dundas Island}

Dance Monkey #4.074: taste of blood.

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_{Interaction(s): gil. - @Roman}

Previously: dance macabre & harpe.

She still feels him within as a correlating spark that shudders as a flame touched by the wind, fanned to heights of euphoric ascension with every breath she takes as they dance. Those same electrifying swathes of energy plummet low on her figure, a dame wreathed in crimson shadows with darling touches of silver that expand and contract on the rush of her emotions. The world as it was could only marvel at the encompassing energy of self that rushed through every coil of nerve, blood, and rigid bone, every breath that rose and fell, and skin that glistened in a gilded sheen with sweat that sweetened every taut muscle exposed by black silk. She felt the vibrations of music down to her toes, heels that snapped and dragged and slid as Amma danced; Gil was a wreathed red shadow in her path, a half-in and half-out figure that she tasted still, tongue dragged over lips and teeth and bitten through her smile all instinctual and primal and edged in bliss that coated her lashes with every flutter. She was alluring, a being of enchantment, a twirling phantom of black and gold, where something bloomed liken to a flower in the sun, a bright yellow hue that sheered through her, a core of red, of white petals, of something that anchored into the void and slid through the cracks of an obsidian wall and fixated on the glimmers of hope that shined through the dark.

The music spiraled into another song, a beat that she harmonized with, a strum of an instrument not often seen that vibrated and droned and dragged through the crowd as a more sensuous conductor. A suspension of the unknown, the in-between, no lyrics to synchronize with the melody that inspired some to linger and others to depart, a crescendo that never came but lingered on the precipice of a drum and a snapped snare. It came in a unification of three, a sacred marker of life and reality that filtered in and out, the beginning, middle, and end, the many faces of a woman, man, and time eternal.

One - a hand snaked forth, pulled her in, a dip of her body into the darkness below.

Two - pulled heavy, tight, flush, and wed against a muscled frame.

Three - a whisper in her ear, a heated breath that trilled and laughed and uttered:

Tiamat.

She froze.

The name slithered betwixt the cage left ajar on ivory hinges, a fluttering heart therein that seized at the mutter of her other self that wailed and cried, that raged and scoured the world as a chained beast. The fragments of writhing power and connection swelled in warning, a claw mark of dread down every link in her spine gone rigid. She flinched, the power of names tethered and bound through her blood, hooks that dug deep and valid and manipulated those of life and death, a manifest that thrummed and beat at a mutilated core of uncertainty that now tasted resentment and fear.

Tiamat. Tiamat. Tiamat.

More whispers skittered as light chased shadows through her mind, rats in the pit of despair that chittered and fed on the dregs of phosphorescent malice left forgotten on a tiled floor sopped to the foundations with death. A netherworld, inked into her, scarred, left for ruin and damnation, and a name that marked her throat, her soul, her very meaning of identity taken and then sputtered out into a moniker that was everything, anything and all.

Amma stilled, her hands shook, and a whispering voice purred through her lobe sickly sweet:

– you are Tiamat. Chaos. Life. Death. Creation. We have so much work to do– you and me.
– the final piece I have been searching for. Perfection –

– yes, there it is. That’s it!

This is your role, your purpose – a weapon. An End. 'And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.'

Memories suddenly unlocked, twisted with rusted keys, crimson dust, and edges through a shattered door that hissed and sputtered, droning pipes and the ocean that churned yonder slivers of glass that called out to her – the hand in the dark, the hand that held onto her own and the eyes that bespoke of betrayal as she cruelly twisted as a knife in the dark, a mere child.

Let’s put it to the test, shall we?
I want you to kill –

He’s coming, mon petit – he is coming. He’s coming for you; you have to run!

It lasts only seconds, a flash of a warning, a voice that haunted her waking world that stood before her shrouded in white, and then –

You need only speak the words.

Say it. Sayit. Sayit. Say. It.

NO.

Amma collides with Gil on a misstep- trembles, gasps, an intake of breath that comes away wet and thick, suffocating from the cumbersome reveal of fragmented voices that collide as the wrath of a would-be god. She attempts to anchor herself with the scarlet thread that shimmered from the white petals pinned to her dress; the music finally dissipates on a cord plucked like her sensitive nerves quivering with a violent tempo. Every quake through her body is a feral sensation of flight or fight. She reigns everything in and down and feeds it to the void that stares back with glaring blue eyes and a roar that is here and then not, shattering as an esoteric drone of alienated fears betwixt her ears as she breathes. He holds her, and there she remains, refusing to acknowledge the voices in her head.

And just as they are there, they are soon gone, whispering away into nothing. The music returns, and Amma blinks back that unshed fear that had her body in a vice, slipping away as sand through the surf, as water that ebbed and flowed, guided under the moon. It fell away into nothing, the blissful euphoria returning, reclaiming hold over her reasoning of self, and when Gil asked if she was all right- if anything was wrong- Amma just slowly shook her head and said:

"It's nothing."

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Augmented Reality Center - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, Dundas Island}

Dance Monkey #4.059: dance macabre.

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_{Interaction(s): gil. - @Roman}

Previously: burgundy.

Through the crowd, she had ventured, lost to the time and sway of light and music as she observed, gazed, studied, and wore a delicate smile wreathed with intent and purpose, a secret baited on sweet breath, a vixen-esque facade afforded for the evening and carefully molded into place. That pale face oft heralded with swathes of pain and rage as the forsaken beast lulled into something more before delicate whispers rose and fell on her ears as webbed temptations to stir her ire. Her name was harshly uttered, her likeness described coming from the Lynx House, another whispering tale of the Trials, of her guarded room in the infirmary. Of a forest rendezvous and a curiously destroyed tent.

Someone had seen her pick her way down the cliffs that night.

What did she do? What had she done? And the eternal inquiry that marred her shadow for an entire year: why was she here?

Blackjack may have slowly begun to trust her (though, doubtful, for there was no mistaking the utterance of Tiamat in the Trials and specific individuals that would likely never refer to her as comrade or friend), but did that stabilize foundations for the entire campus to forgive and forget where she had come from? Perhaps not the only Foundation transfer, but the most infamous in every path she carved with waves of scarlet power at her beck and call. A sower and reaper of destruction shrouded in mystery as a cowl of demented forgeries in the name of her mother, her father, and Jonas.

She breathed—sharp, quick—and felt her power stir, liken as a serpentine creature bound to flesh and the cage of bone therein. Those vipers hissed to life in wreathes of black shadow and weighted over her shoulders as three, a manifested trio with eyes of blue that lashed forked tongues at her quickening pulse as more whispers crested as waves frothed and raging and crashing against the banked edges of her fortified will that shored as obsidian walls inlaid with red.

The music cycles from one genre to the next, requests made, some adhered to, some not, ignored for the already predetermined programming to keep them committed to a time that fell back to the immersion of pinnacle socialization and finance. Deep bass vibrated throughout, felt down to the marrow, whilst harmonizing pitches of brass instruments rose and fell, a cadence that inspired many attempts to keep in time with the rapid beat that permeated each melody as it was given. Bodies enmeshed and arms entwined, a wedding of flesh and heat that helplessly raked through the space barely left for naught between couples and groups that amalgamated on the dance floor: awkward pairs, friends in some, one that dipped a girl low in the brightest of garish pinks that clung to every crevice of her body, bodice adorned in glittering sequins. Another of two women that spun out and into one another, a dress of white and one of silver in reflecting silk and chiffon lace that coiled down slender arms locked into an embrace. Little ceremony spared for the blissfully unaware couple lost to the shadowed corner where a crimson drape hung precariously over the heated swagger of lips and tongues, curiously compared to the laughter flung out far and wide from those encouraged by the interchanging music, still beside their claimed tables.

And then it tapers off into the quaint allure of a slow melody, twinkling chimes, and violin strings that lament love and loss and heartache, the romantics that sway under dimmed lighting burning hot as globes that flickered to amber fluorescence that painted everyone and everything in golden lamplight. Her embellishment turned dark and luring; resplendent hues palmed over waxen skin and the silk of her dress rippling with every sway; a void, the obsidian likeness that plumed through the crowd as a raven’s wing, feathers of the gloom in every step as she meandered, at ease and alone.

Amma had sought peace at the brass railing once more, gazing from up high, sipping delicately on red wine that she swirled through the seat of her glass once and then twice; legs of burgundy clung to the curve of translucence before she drained it down to the last drop. A pleasant sensation of warmth took residence through her limbs, whorls of heat that swept low in her belly as she breathed in and out, a soft sigh over the pout of her lip as she raked a delicate hand through her mane of hair and absently strolled back to the bar to order another, the bottle already procured and poured graciously with a smile as her currency of gratitude that left the student stumbling and mute, mouth agape— the Queen of Darkness, as some muttered, was not entirely without charm. Or, better yet, another coined moniker from the rather ardent Cassander (oh yes, she heard him once before; such an abrasive figure, a chaffing and relentless man that bore fang and claw in primitive stature.) Elvira, she thinks he once alluded to her as, and perches her full mouth on her glass and drinks, welcoming the tannins on her tongue. Acid pools away through her mouth before plummeting to the incredible ease she feels spooling through nerves and blood, limbs graciously relaxed before emptiness churns away at her stomach, waiting to be plied with food rather than drink. Butler passed hors d'oeuvres consisting of minor delicacies of seafood and non; cheeses garnished with basil, tomatoes on top of a toasted bread someone named a crostini, quaint tartlets with mushrooms, and some sweet treats cupped in flaky pastry bread called filo and topped with mint that she popped past painted lips, tasting berries and dolloped cream.

The whispers followed her there, too, poised and held aloft as whips she decided to smother with another pull of her drink. Her gaze flickered over the rim of her glass and compelled her audience to quiet and hush, trading their whispers with another name she knew well, some gesturing off-handedly as a familiar sensation washed over her. When someone approached her, the circumference she commanded writhed with it, the world and serpents adorned with her prowess arising to the silent challenge thrown there, so few that dared to brave the sphere of influence adhered to her form. Lids panned low, and lashes fanned against her cheeks as she leaned back, her spine against the railing and her leg bent, her sharp heel rising against the swell of her calf before it snapped back down with a flicker of red.

It was the same man from before, with a smile that betrayed the wealth of his eyes, which matched the grey of his suit in tones of monochromatic refinement. He stopped, a relatively meager crowd at his back as if lambs were being led to the slaughter.

“So it’s true then, you did sleep with Gil last night.”

Amma laughed, drank, and mulled an answer with a long draw of silence.

“...So, what they say about Lorcán and you must be true then—left a teammate to do all the work while you and he ran off together in the woods.”

“And, what’s it to any of you?”

“I’m just saying that a lot of things changed when you showed up. People talk, you know, see things. Hear things. Some of my friends left when your Foundation showed up–here for just a year-- and then they came knocking on the door, and now you’re sneaking around the dorms.”

Amma scoffed, eyes cast away, disinterested as she tipped her head back, her neck on display, and the name etched in her flesh stretched taut, emphasizing the harsh lines marked to her throat as a brand of memorabilia. Eyes traced black lines and more, marking the ‘I,’ the ‘M,’ and then the secondary ‘M’ inked there, curling over the fourth letter as her throat bobbed with enticing finesse. She nearly drained the rest of her drink before she passed it off to him and smiled, teeth perched on the pout of her lip darkened by the wine she imbibed; her tongue passed over, dipping to the corner of her mouth before she said with a voice fringed in biting tones that lanced betwixt them on tendrils of scarlet infamy:

“Your barking exhausts me. Hold this for me, yeah?”

She descends from the mezzanine with a hand brushing through glossy midnight tresses, a subtle perfume left at the sharp rap of her heels—reminded then of how people saw her.

She tells herself, as she always has, that she does not care.
She tells herself that over and over and over again.

On the dance floor, she hears raised voices, privy to the commotion by the immediate recognition that follows with her eyes drawn to baby blues and golden spun hair – and she saw everything. While Cassander was all deliberate aggression and wanton rage, Lorcán was not, a balm of sorts that maybe one would assume to his rather vehement cousin, but Amma curiously wondered why he held back. Why another rose as a champion to defend Aurora’s honor, and whilst she could very well hold her own (she had stood up to her, after all, her previous warning aside), it was still a peculiar notion to contemplate as she observed, watching the pair before they winked entirely out of existence.

And that was that.

The music resumed with ceremonial glamor, edging into a rather soothing comparison to what had just occurred, inspiring a twirling sensation through her spine. However, even such melodies could not snuff out the whispers that, too, followed her here. Soft mutterings of Blackjack’s disreputable distinction: of course, it’s something about them; it wouldn’t be an event without something happening with Jim’s favored team leading the scandal. Amma glided across the dance floor at that, a path that parted mindlessly around her, a barrier created as the plucking strings of bass swept through her, quickly accompanied by the electric droning of a guitar that she stepped in time with, eyes drawing entirely over dancing pairs, searching through the crowd that rushed to resume their swaying twirls and shuffling steps.

That’s when she finally found Gil, a plate in one hand and a drink in the other, and there she stood, eyes fixated on the spot he claimed, his stare peering through the crowd, presumably in search of their teammates. Amma only spared him a flickering glare, the blue of her eyes sparkling under dimmed bulbs, words spoken earlier igniting through the swell of her thoughts that sweltered under the vibrating timbre that suddenly commanded the space betwixt her ears. With the droning words came a swirling cape of scarlet that fled down the length of her body, seductive amplifications of her powers unbidden that slid down the skirts of her dress and onto the dance floor, firing to life as a blooming cosmos of the world that was held upon the mercy of her passionate desires. She stepped back and forward; every move instantly met with a pulse of power that skittered along the velvet lines of her heels. Edged in donning lights of silver, those summoned wisps vibrated and wreathed through her gestures as Amma spun, finding a random person to clutch, a hand that pulled her back, and a body that shimmered with obsidian shadows the more her power fixated onto the toiling HZEs felt through every breath she took.

Within and without.

Her powers swirled entirely through those around her, playful and mindless crimson plumes that rose and fell, some igniting above and showering the dance floor in glittering sparks of interchanging ruby hues that plummeted as falling stars. All the while, she felt an inevitable pull to the edge of the dance floor as she danced, a devastating illustration that was Amma Cahors and the magnetism she commanded, set beside the fear of the unknown that was she. A darling smile adorned her face, one body and onto the next that she danced with, compelled by a song felt and seen and heard through every daring twirl and dip of her body, flashes of tattoos and ink lined in skittering coils of red to emphasize the netherworld marked onto her.

And then, finally, she came to the edge, spun out as a whorl of black and white with a smattering of gold, her heel snapping dangerously close to where Gil stood, finalized by the twirl of red and silver along her legs. Her breath came quick, heated, and exhilarated, fanning softly from her full lips until she plucked at the white pinned to her dress, glancing down and then up, studying the purple suit he had selected for the night and was drawn closer; the delicate flowers in her hand suddenly ignited by the red wealth of her powers.

“Hey there, casanova.” She breathes. "I'd ask you for a dance, but looks like you have your hands full."

There and then not, Amma’s remaining smile the only offer as she was tugged back immediately onto the dance floor, a line of red instantly squirming its way through the bodies that closed Gil off to her piercing stare, drawn to the place he stood before it suddenly vanished on a wisp of red, shaped curiously like a petal, and fell with the chiming bell of her laughter.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Augmented Reality Center - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, Dundas Island}

Dance Monkey #4.051: burgundy.

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_{Interaction(s): -}

Previously: i looked the future in the eyes, it's mine.

With Lorcán’s departure, Amma followed after him with her eyes, watching then as he approached Aurora, the following conversation muted to her ears with the music thrumming up and over her, creating a subtle vibration through her gestures as she peered through her lashes and swept her gaze elsewhere. They’d figure it out, one way or another, if such were meant to be through the destinies of the world and the hearts woven through the fabric of fantastical reality. If maybe their souls were bound, or perhaps something more substantial flitted through those damned strings that too wove through hands scarred through the lines of fate nestled within her palms. Amma wonders then how her mother felt, for memory served of sad eyes and smiles of blue, a blue that reminded her of her own impression but sparkling with life – a hue of christening innocence she found in Aurora’s gaze. A tone of azure in Katja’s uncertainty and heartache, a darkened shade of steel, and a lost glimmer in Gil’s gaze that sheered through her barriers and burned for all the woe he witnessed in her and for the mistrust and anger banked hard into Rory’s glare whenever he looked at her—a lost and forlorn knight in regret for not slaying the dragon.

Or would those threads weave Lorcán back to her side, where a label clung precariously to an established edge of friendship, a similar fixation that Amma had given to the likes of Katja and Haven, each rung of familiarity classified with mutual understanding, one held on a promise and another held on pain and rage, for that faceless unknown that cantered through her nightmares on heated words of damnation and redemption. Darling names and classifications of an imperfect reality, where the dreary and ragged cape of her waking world was nailed as a flimsy barrier against the machinations of her many names. The one here, though (Amma, she tells herself, no whisper of Tiamat through her mind, and no hastily stricken name that compounded her with fear for the power lain within), she admired the tables, their centerpieces of fluttering white feathers, the deeply jeweled red of their runners and ran black nails against gold speckled curtains before she palmed glistening and polished brass and ascended towards the mezzanine with the whisper of silk at her back. Where did Gil mesh with all those threads? She pondered: no label to mark, no claim to stake, just a delicate pin of tiny white flowers that she plucked at, head tilted in distraction before she dropped her hand and twirled a lock of black hair.

From up high, Amma could see all, and it was a peculiar sensation to be as she was, who she was, looking down onto the students of P.R.C.U, to be one of them and yet not, no matter how often Jim stated otherwise to her peculiar enrollment. With the letters now revealing Jonas’ knowledge of her, the things seen (what was coming, she had to ponder on, what did he see but could not tell those closest to him) and her father too, both characters vying for that power and potential unspooling from her flesh and bound to the thrum of energy that coated every living thing. To be manipulated, to be destroyed, to be created as something entirely new and unthought. A clipped nail of black pressed down into the brass railing where a crackling thread of scarlet bloomed and wrought through the alloy and then down before her eyes widened, immediately severing the link of ruination before it spread further. So easily undone but carefully contained, or was it? Could it be her placated emotions and the heat of alcohol through her that tempered those ambient HZEs that hearkened to her influence, or was it something within, something not easily explained, that sluiced beneath pallid skin and lighted blue eyes with the power of command and allurement in every step she took? The letters answered nothing, but perhaps it settled something therein to know that maybe someone saw her, saw her for all that she had done and would do, and tried to stop it from happening.

To be seen was to be heard, even if her screams sheared betwixt heart and soul and never left her aching lungs. Even if her life could have been different, was it worth lamenting over when the path of vengeance wavered before her as a mountainous climb adorned in the pits of a netherworld unseen?

Amma inhaled, soft breath churned out in a sigh before she turned and approached the bar where the student standing behind the makeshift well tensed and met her eyes with flickering unease.

Ah, yes, there it is.

“What can I…”

“Red wine, if you have it. Cab, or a Pinot.”

He held up a bottle, the label undiscernible, and she waved her hand with a slight smile. She didn’t expect much, but the idea of partaking in more liquor didn’t sit well with what she had already indulged in. Delicate fingers curled over the stem, her wrist rotating to churn the rather heavy pour of a burgundy liquid that gave sweet notes of fermented berries and chocolate that she sipped on; her eyes fell back to the railing as the projected band easily swept into another song and the student body with it. She hummed softly, lured by notes that fell betwixt her ears, a note that delicately wed to the purring graces of her cadence, lips parted around another sip of her drink, her gaze flickering to and fro, back and then forth, constantly shifting as she studied the dance floor and felt the draw to intermingle with those gathered there. There was no obligation or promise that withheld her at the spot she claimed on the railing, one hand delicately perched whilst the other curled fingers against the globe of her glass and held it so. Would it matter if she danced with others? What stalled her steps and had her deny those earlier who had inquired? What was she waiting for?

Who.

A subtle whisper proclaimed as a minute voice within that inspired a soft laugh and a dimming of her eyes, peering over the rim of her glass as she took another drink and ran her tongue over the pout of her lip at the droplet lingering there.

With a concealed smirk and a cunning spark that lighted her eyes, Amma left her spot at the railing and once more dipped into the crowd around the bar, disappearing entirely from sight.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: The Augmented Reality Center - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, Dundas Island}

Dance Monkey #4.046: i looked the future in the eyes, it's mine.

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_{Interaction(s): -}

Previously: between shadows and light.

The world was often beholden to the impression and influence that was Amma Cahors.

It melded into a massive construct of red, donned in touches of silver and banked with deep obsidian that gleamed with ashen remains; it swelled therein with potential, need, and a yearning for omnipotence. An almighty being that raged with appetence, hunger, a void that demanded to be sated, a glutton for the sweltering energy that permeated the air with every sharp rap of her heels onto the pavement, every swish of silk with a trailing skirt that fanned around the golden sheen of her thighs; a cape of shadow, of night eternal, woven through with a smattering of promise and intention. Alone but all-encompassing in every swagger, a near march into a field of unknown where the moon fell upon her, mocked her in all that resplendent silver, highlighted those scars, and delicately flashed at the white pinned temporarily to her dress until she would pin it onto another. There was a particular whorl of energy that linked through her gestures, herself so in tune with the wiles of the world that suspended itself from the emotional coil that flexed betwixt flesh and bone, spun through in leagues of damning red that sluggishly crawled over her skin, down her legs, sparking to life with each step made.

Amma had stopped by her dorm one final time to drop off her things; the letters were still left there, her old uniform haunting the space on her bed, and the usual grace of her room malformed by the lingering emotes of anguish represented in the shattered tiles and scarlet lances. Another time, though, to acknowledge the disparity of her past and the lies it was built of, she would find her answers eventually (the fog of her memories be damned), but the night had beckoned, and so she had taken the letters, her uniform next, and hid them away.

What was and had been and thus came to be: a concept of circumstance that may have taken life away from her, but she would take it back without forgiveness and without regret. And it started here.

The Alexandria Foundation had its dances, of course. Stories she had heard about with many nights of revelry that celebrated assorted achievements of impending graduation that she had not been privy to. As she admitted to the girls, it was all lost upon her, for she had been taken, locked, down into the dark often during these times, more so in the last few years (what she can remember); jollification traded for sheering agony and screams for the hated prick of burning liquid that fled through veins. The oozing black that fell from eyes of glowing blue, the tears of hate and blood and death she wore as a child, a teenager, an adult.

Just a girl.

Throngs of seniors led the way to the A.R.C, some paired, some in groups, a few that lingered there with familiar glances that fled her way almost instantly, each panning eye that swept over her embellished physique for all she revealed, and she relished in it. Amma smiled, a slumberous and vulpine simper that broke across her usual glaring facade, a carefully softened curl of her full lips that she had added to with a final swipe of rouge onto her pout. She blended it out into a soft bloom of a rose-like color, the warmth of the ruby undertones taken to her usual pale lip color, just that final touch she needed. Here, she was more than the terrifying transfer student, more than the brutally angry representative of wrath, and more than the in-between and the unknown. She was Amma. Her name that is not her name scoured through the night, ruthless in abandon, a fixation onto the minds of others as she carved that path through the glow of the night.

A senior from Myotis stopped her and asked her if she had a date. Amma denied it– claimed she didn’t need one.
Another senior from Gulo paused to ask her for a dance later. She laughed.
Another from the house of Lynx claimed to have seen her the previous night and bravely asked her to save him a spot on the dancefloor. Amma smiled and simply said, “It’s not your room I was in last night, was it?”

Was it the subtle seduction of an evening of promise that found courage through the gatherings of people here, a myriad of colors before her eyes as she wove herself into the student body with relative ease. A contortionist aptitude that allowed her lithe figure to sweep through as admiration dawned upon her glances at the bold decor with those daring reds, darling golds, and contrasting blacks; looking further in was a herald back to a time of rapid fashion, the ornamentation a uniqueness she appreciated even if such could be likened to a near gaudy affair. Amma marked the velvet rope and stanchions that made up the entryway, complete with a red carpet; was this what it meant for the glamorous of Hollywood? She glanced over her shoulder; the exaggeration and elaborateness swept up many. Noted by the height of their laughter, eagerness compounded through their steps whilst she lingered there, scanning the crowd perhaps though she would deny the flutter of her lashes as she studied the space around her.

Amma subtly ran her fingers through her mane of hair, shaking the waves back and exposing her slender shoulders. She was prepared to enter the A.R.C. alone if not for the familiar voice that suddenly called to her, causing her to turn and offer her profile for the interesting eyes that trailed down her figure.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Gulo Dorms - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University.}

Dance Monkey #4.034: hostage.

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_{Interaction(s): -}

Previously: atlantic.

Dear Ms. Cahors,

You don’t know me, but I know you, and I know of your daughter. I have seen what the world has done to her and I have seen the countless lives she will touch.

There is a tale Amma often thought of, not just of the forsaken soul cast away from on high that sought the love of life lost and forsaken, but rather a unique telling that artfully depicted the herald of a crown, sword, scales, and a bow. A chalice too that tipped over and spilled forth torrents of blood and from the depths of conspired life, the manifest of many heads and serpentine necks writhing through the flames of both crimson and silver, edged out into the void as blue eyes attached to the many faces of a beast gazed upon her from yonder the obsidian that rose on the foundations of her bones. There are cracks through the forsaken gloom, wed to the discrepancies gorged upon her heart, her soul of souls malformed and misshapen. Pieces of herself suddenly lost, given to others, tendrils of scarlet thread that looped through her trembling fingers as lines that fled off into the distance unknown and bound Amma to obligated miseries and connections she would’ve rather seen burned once upon a time.

Ashes to ashes.

The terrible power she will come to bear is the likeness that no child should ever have to endure. Though not her fault, it will slowly destroy her.

She feels as if she is missing something. Something, or someone, that had taken away a fragment of self from things she cannot begin to understand: the chalice now tipped over, the remnants of a person lost within and without. The coils of her powers then sputter and crackle, lightning fragments summoned and a face like her own looming forth and wrought with terrible laughter. It is her face, but then not; it is a shadow - an Apparition - that leeches upon the display of scarlet miasma that feathers from her parted lips on a shaky exhale. Fogging through the shower's steam, Amma slowly succumbs to her knees as water pelts and pounds over her supple shoulders. Heat sluices through her entire body; it runs rampant through her veins in fiendish lines of hate and despair, the laughter slowly spinning and pinpointing to a ringing cruelty that shatters betwixt her ears and cradles her head within her palms.

We can help her. I can help her. There are ways to curb and mentor her abilities, ways that we can take what I know it is you fear and guide her to peace.
For I know what happened at the church.

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, heavy is the heart that beholds the scepter, or would she better yet dub it the sword, and heavy is the hand that reaps, pillages, and destroys. The scales are tipped all to one side, plummeted to the edge of her heart, and the bow is pulled taut, like her spine, curving inward until it sings and snaps, and there it unleashes spindles of black in the form of her memories that pulse in tandem with her erratic heart. Eclipses of a child screaming to the stars above and lost at sea, a girl barely in her teen years who smiles with others gathered around her –

She had friends once, she thinks. Their faces blurred into monochromatic discrepancies, shadowed profiles of those who had gone missing over the years, people she knew once but whose names she could not remember.

“What is happening to me?” Amma whispers to the tiles of her shower, only for the rising steam to answer; the hissing water drenches over her scars, the deepest ones on her back emblazoned anew, parts of her skin and body that she cannot feel sometimes, parts of her that twitch and ache and pulse every time she uses her powers. The world is quiet, silent.

They will come for her, but you mustn’t allow them to take her. There are many things at work that they cannot stop; they don’t know what is coming.

The world is afraid.
Afraid of her - terrified for her.

“Why can’t I remember?” She blames the shower, she blames the heat, and she blames everything else as Amma struggles to contain the rage within. She wants to wail for a life lost and a love she could have had; she wants to scream for the lives she has taken and only the few she has spared; she gasps and wheezes for the role she has to play.

But I do. There’s only so much I can say, and even then, I should not be writing this letter, but I cannot bear the truths and lies I have seen lain bare in your daughter’s life.

She cries now because she is positively incensed and can do nothing about it.

The morning and the calm and peace she had found there suddenly seemed so far away.
And it is his face she sees as she closes her eyes on the last of her tears.

Mend. Instead of sunder.

Amma tips her face up to the shower and allows the heated water to spell away her sorrows, a baptism of fire as she cranks up the heat and steam blooms and rises like smoke where fragmented lines of black rise with whipping tendrils of red, each line snaked across the tiles as vengeful serpents as everything around her splinters, cracks, and shatters. Ashen remains dotted upon her fanning lashes, a glowing haze of red that descended upon her cheeks from the shimmering depths of hellfire captured within her gaze. Her power writhes down her body, through her scar over the betrayal of her devastated heart, wisps of posturing crimson malice that fall over her breasts, down her torso, slide throughout her curves, and highlight every single scar that Amma has ever suffered in life — too many to count, too many to place.

I implore you to allow her to attend Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, a safe place for her and even for you, if you wish. I promise I will not allow anything bad to happen to her.

With aching slowness, she braces her palms against the broken tile and stands to her full height. The weight of her hair dripped over her bunched shoulders, and the ringing betwixt her ears challenged the noise of the sputtering shower head as she carefully turned the water off and breaths around the sensitivity of her skin flushed pink. Amma moves with a sluggishness that betrays her usual grace, slumberous gestures that fumble through the heated air and snag against a towel before she drags it over her figure, down over her thighs, and back up her curves whilst her mind spirals with the disparity of answers being cruelly denied to her. If anything, she now only had more questions that reaffirmed the eternal inquiry she had for her mother: why?

A question that she also had for her father.

If the second letter was indeed from him, she had to wonder if he too was aware of what she had endured in the darkest recesses of The Foundation. If he and her mother had willingly subjected her to those tortures, Amma was uncertain of what she would do if she had found them, for the sense of betrayal that twisted her features into a reflection of anguish was a weight almost too great to bear. Above all, though, it made her angry; it took her pain and spun it into a likeness of war, rage, a tumultuous fury that shook through her arms as she regarded the harbinger reflected with nearly blood-shot eyes. And why strike out his name? Another secret, another unknown to pile on top of all the things she could not remember, like a pile of bleached bones picked clean and surrounded by great winged creatures of malformed vipers and vultures beset with eyes of blue and red and wreathed in silver.

Would any of it matter, though? Did any of it matter for the role she had to play, the script she adhered to, the tune she succumbed to, and the voices in her head as lines fed to her? Was allowing the past unknown really how she wanted to live her life? Is it irony coated on her tongue as Gil’s words and admissions attach themselves to her circumstances? Did he see something that she could not? Did Haven and Rory? Katja? Lorcán? Aurora and perhaps Sierra too? What did Harper see, with those eyes of hers? Or was that wishful thinking, to assume another could look yonder their own twisted demons and burdens of life, a similar reproach to herself as there was little beyond the obsidian wall that shored itself around her heart with looming chasms and bridges that others stood across from; seeking, yearning, hoping to breach that stalwart conviction that wavered with the dissipating heat of her shower.

Amma stepped back, palms caressing over her abdomen, a long mirror situated off the side that allowed her to study her profile and every stark, raised line of ink she commissioned to reclaim ownership of her body. Every piece was a story inlaid with sorrows, the peculiar and intricate knots over her shoulders where hands had gripped, shoved, and bit. Further down the planes of her slender back, where abstract coils splintered off from her spine and dipped into the horrid scars courtesy of the many times she had been flayed open, her powers erratic and screeching for the abysmal agony that had stolen time and reason from her. She could scarcely remember some of them, along with the peculiar and elongated scars that donned her thighs that she carefully traced over with similarly scarred fingers. Circular ones too that dotted her arms, her hips, and slender, jagged edges over her ribs; she had implored various artists to mark her body, and had seethed at the idea of more needles in her skin, but there was a resurrection found within the deeply seeded ink. Finally, she stilled, fingers curled over her chest, studying the latest scar that bisected the moth usually spread aloft there, horridly marked and split, the curvature of the wound slanted up over her heart; a perfect line, courtesy of abilities that mirrored her own, a figment of pure chaos that pulsated with the truth unknown.

There was only one place on her body that had never been marked: the back of her neck to where, even now, she ghosted fingers towards her nape and stilled. A spear of dread sheered through her limb, and she immediately dropped her hand, palming it over the shudder that flitted away through her other arm. There she stood, studying the paleness of her complexion and the stark netherworld of black lines she proudly displayed, scars and all. The dress she had chosen would reveal these haunts, and that revelation bid Amma to study herself with more critical attention than before. The world would tremble in her wake of rage and anger for the answers denied to her; she would scour the world as a beast bitterly owed the destruction and revenge indebted to her. For she was struck with vanity, hubris, and a glutton for the insatiable wants of life, she knows all this and does not care; the sins of humanity sparing little to her revere. Amma took what she wanted in retribution for the brutality of fate and destiny that took everything from her. Seductive coils of red rose through the barriers of the world, HZEs pulsating in flashes of silver through her entire room, thirty-three feet of pure power that undulated as wraiths with little inhibition as she worked through her hair, brushing eagerly through the mass in preparations to dry it. She would later don her face with blacks and golds, feathered out edges of cosmetics and smokey shadows, a halo of gold on the center, dramatic black lines sharpened with efficiency, and those fanning lashes spiked and curled and lifted upon the blue of her eyes. She highlighted gold upon the apex of her brow, cheeks, and later on delicate collar bones. She aggressively palmed her body to shimmer and glow, and when she turned to regard herself once more, she stood naked as a babe, but through the gloom of her aching heart, she shined.

She knew not what was happening to her; she knew not what this life held for her nor the truth from all the lies. The letters lay as they were, at her feet, wrought through with shimmering lines of hated crimson, and carefully, she stepped over them and regarded the silk lain across her bed, the uniform still left beside it, and the chains that glimmered through the sunset that poured into her room, bathing her in vermillion leagues of fire. Her phone vibrated across her desk, a subtle glow under the rays of light that reminded her to head toward the Myotis dorms, where she had agreed to get ready with the others.

And so she would gild herself as if for battle, for Amma Cahors would be nothing short of devastating.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

Two letters; two strings of fate, each in scarlet twine, each sobbed through with ebony malice, each woven delicately through the fringes of destiny unknown and eternally bound. Each failed promise spun from penmanship done thoroughly and scripted so elegantly that she could decipher the intentions lain through every scrawl of ink and illustrated signature that summoned her daughter’s name. The name she had given, the name whispered through time, the name that spun sorrow through the eyes of the almighty and everything that Charlotte Cahors could see. The galaxies that collided and churned away through bidden lashes, the eyes of All, the eyes of many that fell upon her likeness undone. Ebony hair and bright gaze stricken with the fate of a creature both born of life and death and the delicate touches of her father– a name she muttered into the night, forsaken and without, a name that loomed before her and summoned their child of love promised and yet lost.

But–

She had never told him that she was with child, she never uttered of the conception, never gave word to even when she was born in the first touches of winter. Though little surprise colored her facade as she received the letter, only a few days after the one she had received from Jonas, each so carefully crafted; the promises of a better life, a means to see the power within contained, controlled, conformed to the betterment of a child that would know nothing but pain for the terrifying manifest within. Charlotte would look upon these letters for days on end, as red bloomed and sparked and suspended over the innocence curled next to her time and time again, as she held her breath and allowed the name of the man she loved to sway her final decision in the end. When she gave Amma over to those waiting embraces of life undone, knowing not what loomed beyond those doors, unaware of the cruelties calculated and placed and already decided for the child that heralded the eyes of the world’s end.

Life for Charlotte Cahors would be a journey through the underworld and back, her eyes fated to weep blood for All she had seen and could not stop. To the family she had once reached out to, the name Baxter so carefully ruined by the machinations of man and the eternal vexation to be as mortals struggling to obtain the ultimate mantle known as God. Immortality was spent through leagues of dread, suspended through the sunken chasm of the unknown that accompanied the life of Cahors as a shroud of death.

She would only know, maybe some months later, what true hell was decided for her there; the artful words Jonas had spun, to speak of the future and then not, to be forever damned as a man so many steps ahead and detached from reality; unable to save even himself. Charlotte would spend years trying to get her daughter back, the things she would do, to try and save her.

Only for it to have never meant anything at all.

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_{Location: Campus Grounds - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University.}

Dance Monkey #4.032: atlantic.

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_{Interaction(s): -}

Previously: The Price of Mercy.

The ferry ride had been easy, anticlimatic at best, Haven stayed by her side and though apprehension feathered through her and she looked over her shoulder at every turn, Amma remained close by, similar tension that coiled through her entire frame even as she browsed through a myriad of colors and fabrics and palmed through the racks with little care to the final selection. Her earlier encounter with Sierra played over in her mind, her eyes drifting towards Harper every so often. She didn’t spare much thought to the dance before, as Amma had been determined to not attend, every moment of its mention having been met with a careless shrug and a lackadaisical commitment. Memory served it being brought up at the beach, where Harper had approached her with Katja and Gil, and here she stilled, fingers delicate and threaded through chiffon and silk, she could’ve sworn someone had asked her, a hazed affair through her thoughts and the shadow of memories betwixt her ears as she then caressed through sleeves of nylon and ventured further into the store.

Gil hadn't asked her, and she did not return the favor in kind. To inquire such, with the promise spoken of seeing him later, prompted answers to things that they were not prepared to acknowledge. Amma found that it was enough but the heated breath and the flush that sired through her bones rekindled the perplexities she discovered in his kiss; the calm she had found, the disassembly of the projected creature that was she - forever intertwined with the meaning of ruin and despair. The advocate for pain and rage traded under the moonlight for a girl who just wanted to love and be loved in return.

Just like her mother, perhaps, her memory gone thick and hazed and donned in a veil as if a maiden. The haunted figure of her dreams, laden through silver glass shattered at the corners that bled through with oozing black, her likeness cast upon a shell of a woman that clutched two letters betwixt her trembling hands drenched and stained in dried blood the color of rust.
Amma’s expression descends onto melancholy, tinged in retreating delicacies of wistfulness and confusion as she traces the ebony lines of a dress tucked somewhere in the back, an obsidian color adorned in silks, a daring and dramatic number assembled carefully from what she observed as she pulled it down and allowed the fabric to pool over her scarred arms; it would push boundaries. It would sire madness. It would compel caressing gazes.

It seemed almost normal, perhaps a bit mundane, to purchase a dress for a dance, something so simple and yet an accomplishment as she gathered her selection and walked up to Haven, letting it drape against her form.

“What do you think?”

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________}

Do you ever wonder, what could have been?
Had Charlotte not given you to them?
Do you ever wonder, what you could be capable of?
If you had gone, stayed, if you had just been.

She did.
And now she knew.

She had come back to her dorm to shower after shopping, only to find the letters and her old uniform laid out on her bed, mere objects to some, but sacred artifacts of her past left undone through the shackles of broken memories. She was sure she had put them away, but now they remained there, calling to her, tempting, and with trembling hands she set her things aside and studied the bindings of lace and chains, the gossamer fabric that used to glide across her skin, the mesh and fortified lining that clung to every cleft and curve of her body. She glanced from it to her dress, and finally to her closet where an assortment of muted yellow danced across the eternal black of her wardrobe; the damned wolverine poised in a shield, a branding she had always mocked. Never knowing what it meant, but still, she wore it, and why? She doesn’t have the answer, not as the letters beckon to her, their own inquires poised to maim and rend her asunder. Her humanity balanced there, on a precipice of no return, where the beast lay and a little girl beside it, both wrapped in fated strings of red.

She tore those seals open with little thought or reflection, seals she realized had been opened countless times and then sealed anew, as if in an attempt to conceal the sins of those responsible. The contents of each letter spin a delicate tale, a lie, the forgeries in each that promise her a better life, a better world, a world maybe that did not hold breath on the chaotic whims of her powerful nature. P.R.C.U and The Foundation both beckoned and clamored for the power, the potential, that was Amma Cahors.

Jonas. He knew of her. Saw her. He knew of her fate. Did that mean he tried to save her? Did that mean somewhere, deep within, her mother knew?

And then she sees it: the next letter, where a name has been scratched out, ran through so many times she cannot make ends meet of the intended embossed there under swatches of black. It’s all redacted information; answers to things she has longed for, now bitterly denied.

Dear, Charlotte, my love –

“No.” She seethes.

It takes a mere thought, only a single spooling of it, that single thread of red that forges from her shattering heart, her breath that punches out in a sobbing gasp. The line of scarlet attaches to the letters, shaking, she was shaking, her entire body shook as hated power threaded through delicate sheets of paper and forged her anger and her rage down the middle of each.

I know it has been some years, and I’ve been trying to get back to you –

“NO!”

The letters she cannot destroy, but she could mark them. Yes, she could defile them, just as someone had already done. Amma drops them at her feet and allows them to lay as they are, lines of red spin through the words that had sealed her fate so many years ago. Black ink bleeding into fragments of her power marked to the scrawling of empty words she could never unsee.

I know about her, our daughter, I know they will try to convince you that she is better off with them.

To think, she really could have been saved. To think, she didn’t have to suffer. To think she didn’t have to pay the price. She could’ve lived.

The campus is not safe. It is compromised. I know I could only tell you so much, about The Alexandria Foundation –

She turns, and there her dress lays, wrapped, pristine, a pool of ink and soft silks that she is undeserving of; to think, she really could have just been as she was: a girl.

But you cannot trust Jonas, I implore you to send her to me. I’ll help her with her powers, I know you are afraid. However, she will be safe with me because I'm her father, and I can help her.

If only her mother had chosen differently.

I promise, I will allow nothing bad to happen to her.

All the power in the world, to find her mother, to find her father, only for it to turn to ash in her hands.

Commencement: A Foundation Institute RP

_{Location: Campus Grounds - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University.}

Dance Monkey #4.031: The Price of Mercy.

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_{Interaction(s): sierra. - @Qia}

Previously: rosemary & pecking order.

Leaving the Lnyx House was different from when she had arrived. She had been greeted in much the same silence, impenetrable beyond the intensity of her glare, but there was a faint whisper, a name she knew and a name she had spun in a similar whisper deepened by passion and desire. Speculation was found there in the utterances, the gazes that flicked up and down, those that fell upon her and her mussed hair before she quickly wove it into a plait over her shoulder upon her exit. The way they stared and spoke, Amma is quickly reminded of a night not unlike the circumstances found here, with her chin held high and her gaze unwavering in the coming day. When she returned from the forest clearing: met with hate, distrust, and figures ready to stand against the display of power she had given when her name had been traded through the night; the challenges marked then and there. There was none to stand in her way now, but the hushed speculations followed her still, and she could not help but compare Lorcán to Gil in that instance. The former was so deeply disturbed by the trailing gossip, and the latter possibly accustomed to such conjectures, but would he be bothered by such mindless musings with her name attached? Infamy cantered eagerly after her likeness, bisected by the reputation she adhered to on her first year here, the shedding of the defiler liken to a snake amid a sacred garden. She was aware of Gil’s star-born history, but the depth and wealth of such was lost upon her. Amma had never seen any of his films and knew nothing of his past just as he was unaware of most of hers.

Well, some of it, perhaps. The Trials had exposed fragments that she had kept hidden, but not all had been revealed. For that, she is glad, grateful even, because if they found out – if Blackjack knew of all that she had done. She wonders if Haven would try so hard to understand her. She wonders if Katja would have agreed to be her friend. She wonders if Aurora would still deny that she was a monster. She wonders if Lorcán would still claim that there was nothing ugly about her.

She wonders if Gil would ever touch her again.

Amma stills, close to the Gulo dorms, gaze cast upon the path before her as eyes follow after her figure donned in the touches of daylight. It does not take much to put two and two together and the resulting additions leave her contemplative until her phone suddenly demands her attention with a vibrating call. She carefully studies the number, the one she knows but never had saved, the same one that had rang her the night before Gil had needed her (she still marvels at that, to be needed) the same number that called her every so often over a time she cannot place. Amma hovers over the notion to accept it before it rolls over to her inbox, a sigh feathered from her tender pout before a familiar presence washes over her. The world reigned to her ebb and flow, the first churning whorls of scarlet looping thrice around her wrists as she turned, regarding the shade of red hair not unlike the crimson manifest that feathers at her lashes and hums away betwixt flesh and bone.

She doesn’t say anything, not for a while until Amma regards Sierra Baxter fully, and with phone in hand, she almost laughs:

“How’d you get here?”

Sierra’s smile is faint, more of a flicker that vanishes before it has a chance to form fully. She feels the corners of her lips twitch, a brief rebellion against the stoic mask she usually wears. The daylight filters through the trees, casting dappled shadows on the path near the Gulo dorms, and she steps lightly, almost as if she’s part of the shadows they provide. “You left the door open,” she says, her voice soft but carrying a hint of amusement, as if she’s teasing Amma for not noticing her approach.

Sierra steps closer, each step bringing her into the soft glow of the sun, her shadow stretching long behind her. Her gaze flicks to Amma’s phone, the screen still lit with the missed call, a silent indication of the unanswered connection. She meets Amma’s eyes again, the spark of frustration in her chest flaring briefly, a familiar feeling that she masks with the same teasing tone from before. “Maybe if you answered your damn phone once in a while, you’d know when someone’s coming,” she says, her voice carrying a blend of exasperation and light….affection. Trust that she rarely gives, a fragile bond garnered over time, now woven into the fabric of their interactions.

“Yes, well,” Amma’s voice lapses off into a wistful sort of reproach done in the finest touches of camaraderie, a delicate grin that slid through her lips, edged into a bite of something feral and more true to the nature of the insatiable woman lain within. “I’ve been busy.”

It was an understatement to the true severity of what they had all endured, to what she had been subjected to herself, a shadow of the pain each member of Blackjack had been forced unto with little consent afforded. So much had happened in so little time, and here stood the epicenter of her latest demise, the one she had spared, the one she was punished for in the final leagues of Hell before H.E.L.P had finally gotten her out. A reason, a purpose, she still did not know; a role she still had to play, a role she still adhered to even in the spun discoveries of her doubt. Amma could proffer many excuses as to why she had been ignoring her calls, but Sierra would likely see through them all, a trait given to all Baxter women that could glean the nature of everyone around them, even if they could not look into themselves in the same light.

“Not so much as how you got here, but maybe I should be asking why. Have you seen Harper yet? Does she know you’re here?”

“Yeah, I actually just left her,”Sierra says, her voice carrying a casual nonchalance. She waves her hands about, the gesture dismissive, as if brushing away the significance of the situation. The slightly cool air whispers against the skin not covered by her jacket, and she feels a slight chill, but it doesn’t deter her. “She had some kind of movie night with Aurora yesterday,” she adds, her tone light, almost playful, as if the mention of such an event is the most mundane thing in the world. Which, given the setting and recent occurrences within it, it is.

“She’s always had this weird way of coping with things so…kinda had to be here for more than just you, I’m afraid,” Sierra continues, her voice dropping slightly, the casual tone giving way to something more serious. It’s a confession, a frustration, she dare not voice to her sister but feels comfortable saying aloud here. She figures Amma would understand, a part of their prior agreement being to look out for the little rat, to begin with.

“Which is such a shame. I do enjoy our little tête-à-têtes.”

“How quaint,” Amma muses, kinship easily found there, a sort of luxury she realizes cannot be afforded to many of them. Perhaps though it was just the same, despite all that had been undone, the two found time to entertain the normalcies of life and friendship, the simplicity of it carries through her eyes, a similar glint discovered as she rolled her weight away from one leg and onto the other. Arms crossed and head canted down, Amma’s eyes spun away from the casualness carried through their exchange, the looming reveal of their intertwined past carefully coming to light.

“Harper is…” Her admissions feather off into nothing, the past year has not proffered much to her, their exchanges little to none, her observations carefully done through the fringes of conversation and interactions kept at a distance. Amma does not bring up what had nearly occurred to her after the trials, where she had attempted to lay blame at her feet, to spin the connection between the two sisters that loosely bound her to them. “She’s trying.”

“As anyone can, as everyone is.” It’s not so much defending her, or Blackjack, as she is unaware of what Harper had undergone, as she is unsure of what many saw during the trials and all that it had exposed. She knows partially of what it had revealed for Haven, Gil, and Aurora too. Amma doesn’t want to think of what it had left vulnerable within herself, the humanity shattered that slowly formed into a shell of a girl thought lost and forsaken.

“It has been maybe a year though. Things are happening here now that have happened once before. Do you know anything of the name Dae– “ She almost can’t say it, it chokes through her chest, punctures through her lungs, shatters through the rungs of her ribs, and rings suddenly through her ears where darkness threatens to descend. Amma clutches at her head, nails against her temple and lashes fluttering against the onslaught of unbidden terror that catches her breath.

“I don’t know. I just –” She lances her scarred fingers through her hair, tugs back through the chaotically compiled braid, and sighs. “I can’t remember. Someone was kidnapped, we saved her, but I don’t know if it’s connected to anything. I know people went missing once before, and it’s likely happening again.”

As Amma speaks about Harper, Sierra senses the hidden meaning of the other woman’s struggle and hesitation, each word carrying a burden that’s almost palpable. She reads the unspoken pain and fatigue in her words, the way her voice falters slightly, betraying the brave front she tries to maintain. It’s clear she’s been through a lot, more than she’s willing to admit out loud. That much Sierra had figured out when they’d first met and along the way, piecing together the fragments that make up the guarded person called Amma. The raven-haired woman is trying to put on a brave face, but there’s something more there, something she’s not saying.

But does Sierra care enough to try and find out? She hasn’t even asked Harper about her experience, after all. Or about any of the events that may have led to hazel eyes turning to white, grasping at the air around her in ugly desperation to find her way. The guilt sits heavy in her chest, a weight she’s not sure how to lift, and it makes her wonder if she’s been too detached, too wrapped up in her own world to notice the pain of those around her.

Or, at least, the pain of the only person that truly matters to her anymore.

The redhead tilts her head to the side, brown eyes regarding the equally pained figure before her. She studies Amma’s face, searching for any sign of what she’s feeling, any clue to the turmoil beneath the surface. “Dae?” she questions aloud, the word slipping from her lips almost unconsciously but in a softness that’s foreign to her voice. Her offering of a fragile olive branch comes in the form of an outstretched hand, one that pauses in its motion with the other’s last couple of words.

“Kidnapped? Here?” Sierra says, shaking her head. Her disbelief lingers in the air, her hand still hesitantly outstretched, caught between offering comfort and pulling back. She eventually drops it slowly, the guilt—her stray companion in the moment—tightening its grip on her chest. She can see the raw emotion in Amma’s face, the kind of pain that’s all too familiar. What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into this time, Harper? Because the redhead is certain that her trouble magnet is involved somehow.

“There is - was maybe, I don’t know now - someone here.” Amma carefully shakes out the remnants of her powers bound through her wrists, linking into pale scars aligned there, the sluggish crawl of scarlet threads cresting over each shoulder before it plummets down her spine and bids to the earth below. “Someone, who I think is responsible for the things I can’t remember. Responsible for…” She carries off into a whisper before all goes silent, the world stills and a breeze carries through the black tresses spilled over her shoulder, lifts them as if gestures dancing through her mane of hair before her eyes snap and pin Sierra to where she stood. There, it happens again, that single line of crimson that shimmers through her gaze ringed around her pupil as a sliver of hellfire unbound, unnamed, and unchecked.

“You found something. That’s why you’re here. Harper may have called you, but…” Amma takes a step forward, it had not gone unnoticed that she had reached out to her, another hand to mark in her waking world, within and without, to the many faces that strayed through her life undone. “What did you find, Sierra?”

Sierra’s gaze shifts to the pocket of her jean jacket, feeling the weight of the letters pressing against her like a physical burden. She pulls them out with deliberate slowness, each movement measured and careful, as if the letters might shatter if handled too roughly. The letters are still sealed, their edges crisp and untouched. The only certainty Sierra has about them is their author and who it is meant for. They represent a key to understanding the past—a bridge to the secrets buried deep within their intertwined histories. As she holds them, the gravity of what they might reveal presses on her, a potential to unravel the mysteries that have haunted both her and, she imagines, Amma for so long.

“These,” Sierra begins, her voice steadier now, “might be the answers you’ve been looking for.” She extends the letters towards Amma, her hand shaking slightly as she does so. “They were sent to your mother before...well, you know what,” she continues, her gaze dropping briefly in reflection, the memories of that time flooding back before she forces herself to look up again. “And could be connected to what’s happening now.”

She doesn’t want them. Her body refuses. Every delicacy of calm and grace she had obtained that morning suddenly spooled away on a phantom gale of unforeseen fate and circumstance, the weighted reality of those letters so carefully proffered to her as sacred relics of a past heralded within and without. Amma doesn’t want them.

No, but she needs them.

“She was right then.” The Beloved that was her, the could-have-been had she not been given to The Foundation, though, she had to wonder if it even mattered; for they had come for her still. The arm revealed that was lain with scars much like her own –

Maybe you should ask our father.

“I remember her sometimes, though it’s all unclear. I remember her often just sitting there, staring off into space.” Amma whispers, reaching forward, the trembling in her hands through every splayed finger as she reaches for the letters, the weight of their delicate bindings profoundly felt as she takes them from Sierra and holds each in her hands. The scars on her palms suddenly burn and it takes everything she is, and every ounce of control she can spare, to not destroy them and the contents within. She wants to ask how she obtained them, she wants to ask if she had any other leads, she almost doesn’t want to know, for she cannot help but wonder if it would matter in the end. If Charlotte was ever found…

“The Foundation is here, on the island, if they find out that you’re here too, I don’t think I can spin it again to get you out alive.”

Staring off into space, huh? Is that where you came in…mom? The image Amma’s words depict is a painful one—a reminder of the way she once watched her own mother, Anna, stare off into the void. It was as if Anna had been trying to decipher the mysteries of the world or, perhaps, the secrets from her research she could never share. Sierra remembers the countless nights spent in silent observation, wanting to pry into that very intelligent mind, to understand the thoughts that kept her mother so in her own head at times. The memory stirs a deep ache within her, a longing for answers that never came, and she wonders if Amma feels the same way now, caught in the web of unspoken questions and elusive truths.

Sierra’s shrug is meant to be dismissive, a casual gesture to mask the emotion welling up inside her. She tries to play it off, to make it seem like she’s unaffected, but the tightness in her throat betrays her. The way her heart clenches at the thought of what could have been different—if only she’d known more at the time, if only she’d been able to bridge that gap before it was too late—makes it hard to maintain the facade. Her mind races with the possibilities, the what-ifs that haunt her every thought. She swallows hard, forcing herself to push the emotions down, to keep them from spilling over, but the effort leaves her feeling raw and exposed.

It is a good thing for the both of them that facades have never been her thing, anyway. At least when not in a practical sense.

“I knew the risk in coming here and wouldn’t have if it wasn’t worth it. A deal’s a deal, right?” Sierra says then. As she watches Amma carefully holding the letters in those scarred hands of hers, a contemplative expression crosses her face.

“You know…it’s almost like it’s all come full circle. It’s like everything that’s happened has led us to this point.” Her tone is earnest here, each word chosen with care, as she pauses and then continues after a beat.
“I know we’ve reached the end of this particular arrangement, but if I come across anything more, which something tells me I will, I’ll make sure you get it. That’s my promise to you.”

“Perhaps,” Amma rejoins in a whisper, careful in her admissions, not wanting to burden Sierra with the truth: for the life she spared in her, and the punishment she endured for. The price she had to pay, the promises woven through her life; each formed into a chain link wed to her heart. They were two women bound and woven unto the falsehood of their mothers, unable to shake the fragments of half-truths and endless lies; never knowing where they began, never knowing where it would end. “Another test I failed: in being sent to kill you.” She glances down at the letters within her grasp. “I don’t know if what you’re looking for is related to what’s happening here but know that if I find your answers within my own, I will ensure it gets to you.”

“And our arrangement still stands, Sierra. She may not need it,” the girl who stood and looked upon her and the monster within, and refused to allow her friend to become just like her. “But I’ll keep an eye on Harper. That’s my promise to you.”

There’s a pause, a shared understanding passing between them, as Sierra absorbs Amma’s words, her demeanor shifting back to the determined, relentless woman she’s become over the years. The role she has played for some time now knowingly and without regret. She turns to leave, but before she does, she glances back at Amma, her voice softened by an undercurrent of genuine care.

“Whatever’s in there…don’t lose whatever you have of yourself to it. You’ve been through too much to turn into what the world wants you to be.”

And with that, Sierra walks away, her mind already spinning with the next steps demanded by her roles, both given and taken up.

She remains silent at that, watching as Sierra leaves, unable to still the quaking in her shoulders, the dappling of sunlight over her shoulders and hair suddenly a weight she struggles to bear, liken to the question that coils through her mind, beholden to her words: if only Amma she knew who - what - she was.