burn my bones in asphodel // vulcan+salus

[wimdy]

k  a  h  i  n  t  a   j  o  n  e  s

The stars still watch her.

Kahinta keeps her eyes on her feet as she shuffles down towards the very south of the district, her most threadbare forest green cardigan wrapped around her and tied into place with a weather-worn brown belt. Half of the notches are torn through the leather, but she adjusts it as she goes, tucking her sweater closer to stave off the chill that has begun to gather as midnight creeps closer. She doesn’t think it’s midnight quite yet. She doesn’t look to the stars to tell, instead pulling out a time-buffed pocket watch that fits like an overlarge bottle-cap in the palm of her hand, ticking quietly to the measure of her steps. Just ten of, and they mean to meet at half past.

If she times it right, she’ll have just enough time to slip past the south guard on their first rotation on her way to Old Osprey’s abandoned barn in the southwest. It’s quiet out there, but the wind ruffles the reedy fields just loud enough that her passage won’t be too obvious. Kahinta’s already made the journey, gone with Melora and Ferris to scope it out, gone on her own enough to get comfortable with the route and the guard rotation. It doesn’t make the nerves under her skin any easier to ignore as she slips from the buildings of the district to the outer stretch of the roads where the farms and homes grow farther and farther apart, her feet carrying her swiftly against the tide of anxiety that bubbles in her chest until she crashes along the shores of overgrown grasses and reeds.

There’s something about Old Osprey’s place that feels haunted. The broken wood slats of the barn let the moonlight filter through in sharp slivers, resting against Kahinta’s back as she steps her way through the littered ground floor. High above her head, she can hear the squeaking of rats or mice in the hayloft, their noises woven into the groan of unstable wood along the side of the building. Kahinta can’t help the shiver that rattles through her, rising on tip toes without thought, moving with the discomfort that steals the safety from her skin.

Then again, there’s nothing safe about what Kahinta has gotten herself into.

Melora calls herself Libertas at their meetings now. No one is addressed by their given name. No one is asked for their given name. There’s security in their secrecy, in their anonymity.

So Salus takes to the darkness of the old barn, and tries to forget what her parents would think if they were to check on her in the night and find her bed empty.

The ticking of her watch seems to slow the world around her, muddled by the noise of the barn and the tall grass swaying just beyond the walls. She sinks down behind one of the seemingly solid beams that remains, folding her long skirt around her as she crouches. This wasn’t even supposed to be her job for the night. Libertas had been spooked by a sudden change of the guard shift in the center of the district, deciding to keep Orcus close to monitor further changes, and Salus had been sent in his place.

Salus had been sent to accept an arms trade.

Her lungs seize in her chest at the thought, and for a moment, she wonders if she should leave. She feels every one of her fourteen years, and feels the years between herself and Libertas and Orcus even more. She is a child, and she wants to feel her mother’s arms around her, hear her sister’s laugh, share her father’s bread. There is a longing for before, but as she sits in the dark and blinks through the tears that threaten and cling at her lashes, Salus knows there is no walking back what has been done.

Temple is alive, but Kahinta feels the cold in her own bones so clearly sometimes that she finds it hard to reconcile the loss she’d been forced to bear with the reality of her sister’s smile over breakfast.

Rough hands worrying at the steady plait of her braid, Salus squints her eyes at the darkness that gives way to moonlight, waiting for the shadows that play in the corners of her eyes to congeal into reality. With each tick of her pocket watch, a practiced numbness curls through her core, replacing that sickly sweet childish longing and settling the shake in her fingers. There’s no more time to linger in before. What matters comes after.