#straywodtba

[lightlorn]

“Give me the burden, give me the blame.              I'll shoulder the load, and I'll swallow the shame.”

[[ @charismastatic​ / ardyn, lyric sc. ]]

[lightlorn]

"Happy Mother's day, dear niece." Ardyn drawls the words, and they and the flowers in his hand drip with miasma. He left his chair for this---picked them from her castle's long neglected gardens. A rose bush can bloom for what feels like whatever without maintenance. That and the weeds are all that's left of what once was her home, besides the walls that Ardyn has long since sieged. "From one maternal older sibling to another." // @humanmoxie

THE VERY IDEA turns to dead weight inside of her, settling into some emptiness inside of her where tradition was meant to take root. It was a slow torture she had not considered before this moment. Mother’s Day was always a time of absence in her home, a void that rolled around the chambers of her heart like a black marble. The salutation, in turn, becomes almost as shocking as the Usurper’s uprooting. Looking into his bloodshot eyes, rheumy with age that would never match his face, she is frozen to the spot.

His offering could soothe her. His offering could be made something separate from herself, a gilded voice and the warmth of an arm around her waist. Roses, her mother had said, from Tenebrae. Later, the queen would present the world to her only daughter, put the globe before her eyes and point out where the strange land was located. A land of flowers, Aulea had said, and gods. Mother held the world in her hands, and her shadow fell over it as she leaned forward, her painted lips like fire against a pale temple.

Her mother had loved the hearty flowers, reaching towards the sky with petals soft as innocence. They had been guarded, too, drawing red blood that stood stark when compared to those colorless blossoms. Stray had not been careful when introducing her brother to Aulea’s favorite, had watched his careless fingers be pierced by the thorns.

She ought to have known then that she would make a poor mother -- but then, she had only been 6 at the time. Six, and ignorant, and still forcing a boy with eyes like honey to be her pretend husband. Twenty years on, she saw what her play of motherhood had amounted to: Dozens of dolls stored away somewhere in the bowels of this palace, and a people she abandoned to the dark beyond.

At least her mother had the best excuse of all for her absence. Death was, after all, eternally pardoned. Stray has crafted her own excuse in turn -- No children, lest the gods turn their eyes upon them with the same envy that had brought the whole bloodline to this wretched night. Her blood would only flow here and now, at the prick of a careless thorn. Her legacy mingles with his ichor for the scarcest moment, eons erased to bring prodigal and promise together.

Her hand curls sweetly around the flower. Aulea’s treasure stands, struggling through the night, with the most stubborn weed of all. He withers before her. She smiles the best she can.

“That’s the way of having younger brothers, I suppose. You never escape being their third parent.” Let it have been different for you, she prays. For all his flaws, let my ancestor have been a little kinder to you. Tell me you never had his loss overhead. 

She raises the rose to her face, letting the sickly sweet of his rot roll over the iron of her blood, trying to remember the perfume of a dead woman. 

“Thank you.”

There is no day put no day aside for the sacrifice of youth, but Ardyn had his ways of making do.