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C H A P T E R T H R E E
Daughter of Gestas
Episode 001 (Romance Dawn)
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THE HALLWAY STRETCHED ominously behind her and, had it not been for the morbid silence of the base, she would have assumed penury was seeping into the crevices of her existence with hellish fanfare soon to mark her entrance to the lake of fire.
She could feel her hands shake, fingertips burning and torn after a measly lost touch that brought accidental recognition towards their mutual existence external to delusions of forgiveness. She couldn't fathom how something so banal as a passing glance — a mumbled name that sounded so pious in her sacrilegious tongue that it could have been venom and she would've mistaken it for sweet honey — could have such power over the otherwise undeterred sangfroid of a cunning mind. It made no sense that despite everything (the heartbreak of looking at his eyes again and seeing only reprobation) she still wanted to return to him, and she was never one to admit such weakness.
Sometimes she was ashamed of feeling so alone out of her own volition, but the existentialist in her strived to prove (if only to make legitimate her decision to remain a base spectator of frail beauty, to long for the edge of his ivory sword against her neck) that company had a worthless quality and it was only that which she gave explicit power to that would reign over the sally ports to her right atrium. Zoro was temporal, merely a speck of sacramento in a dark slate to which her eyes would soon be blind, too dazed by the darkness to discern the shapes of his features within the memories that remained; she was a bulwark of corruption who could only seek for the retribution that determined her death to be burning at the stake in utmost isolation for the crimes she had committed.
Wasn't it in her nature, she chided at herself, to merge with the solitude? To envision the shadows, melt within a crevice and blur the difference using Arachne's meagrely careful methods so not even a keen eye could decipher where she ended and the darkness started — that was her only plausible origin and end, the source and demise of the impious criminal in the final judgement.
But dura lex sed lex; every calyx has a tipping point, and it is only a matter of time before its contents spill.
She willed herself to forget for at least as long as leaving Shells Town again would take when she nearly dropped the handful of keys she had managed to steal from an awfully unsupervised guardroom. The young cadet napping beside the door, chair dangerously propped against the wall, stirred in his sleep before grumbling and cuddling further into his arms, and Tyche didn't know what it could be other than an ad hoc warning from the Fates commanding her to focus properly. With a shaky breath, hands clutched together over her pearl blouse to tie her thoughts down, Tyche forced her senses into centring her thoughts and every intent on the toll she had chosen instead of on such simple past temptation.
