[ One of the most exhausting things about the young is their certainty. The so-called Saint of Awe, her title as apt as Mercymorn's was, rakes her eyes over her elder, and believes that she sees. The little Lyctor stakes all her temerity on this, oozes her casual, contemptuous pity on the very premise of it.
Mercy thinks of plucking her shining arm from its socket. She entertains thrusting her fingers through the thin bone of her temple and coming away dripping the putrescent slime of her too-clever brain.
She is so impossibly young, this juvenile monstrosity, as she reclines against the wooden boards and speaks of living. Her petty hurts all cluster so close to her surface, as thinly sheathed in gilt as her elegant bones, and she does not begin to understand pity. Not yet.
Mercy plants her foot back on the sand. ]
You must think your elder siblings very foolish. [ Mercy studies the pale, peaked points of her pinched face. ] ...of course you do. You, with a myriad before you? All that time, for anything you ever wished to do...and all the better for my absence. It's so dreadful to have sisters. Always the competition.
cw: gore, body horror (imagined)
Mercy thinks of plucking her shining arm from its socket. She entertains thrusting her fingers through the thin bone of her temple and coming away dripping the putrescent slime of her too-clever brain.
She is so impossibly young, this juvenile monstrosity, as she reclines against the wooden boards and speaks of living. Her petty hurts all cluster so close to her surface, as thinly sheathed in gilt as her elegant bones, and she does not begin to understand pity. Not yet.
Mercy plants her foot back on the sand. ]
You must think your elder siblings very foolish. [ Mercy studies the pale, peaked points of her pinched face. ] ...of course you do. You, with a myriad before you? All that time, for anything you ever wished to do...and all the better for my absence. It's so dreadful to have sisters. Always the competition.