Little Bird

Gwenavyre feels exhausted by the time they leave the Keep, her body was so tightly wound and yet so loosely held together all at once.

“...Little Bird…”

She shudders, it’s almost as if she can feel him trying to crawl inside her ears to sow seeds of disgust that aim to grow roots in the deepest parts of her.

“...What is a Tyrant?...” Gwena isn’t sure she heard the question right, thankfully Elion is swift with a reply. The haze still gnaws at her focus and as he speaks everything feels wrong. Why had she confided in him? Why had she held her tongue and stayed her blade when it was clear the monster she was confronted with inside? All this time spent outside of the dark, drowned in light, and all she can keep asking herself is why?

Is it her that’s wrong? Perhaps if someone else feels it.

“I don’t know much of Tyranny, but I do know this feels wrong, doesn’t it feel wrong to you?” As Elion responds in his own way once more, speaking of hard choices, mass graves, blood running over his hands…

In her head his words mingle with the screams that haunt her every moment of every day. Mass graves? Her home is one. Blood running over fingers? She witnessed the blood of her kin, her own blood, seeping into her hair, her clothes, staining her very soul.

And since that day? Her hands have only seen more blood, the blood of those who’d tried to kill her first, of those who would have tried had she given them the chance, did she have a choice?

So much death, so much loss, so much crippling agony.

It’s as Elvira scoops Elion into a rather awkward looking hug that Gwenavyre slips away from them. She veers off toward the treeline, to where no one can see her.

Her chest heaves once more, forcing too much air inside her lungs and making her head swirl, albeit differently this time. Every time she grasps at her memories, every second she tries to find something good, she feels flames lapping at her flesh. It’s as though everything she loves, everything she loved… Is trapped inside a raging inferno and the moment she got away alive, she was no longer welcome.

Perhaps Sir Bastien was right, she is a little bird, she is caught in a cage.

But it’s not one of her own making.