Pink Sword (Stained By Our Blood and What We Know)

I found you, but not as you were

This is based on @riririkinzi 's au on Tumblr, follow her to give her some love.

Nimona felt somewhere, deep in their chest, that something was wrong. It was a mere thought when leaving her camp near the village, a paranoid whisper as she climbed up the mountain, and a war drum when she smelled the blood.

The blood, so potent, so heady and metallic, and Nimona's heart stopped when she smelt it while still miles from the orphanage. The fear flooding in her veins shocked her legs to move faster, caution abandoned as they headed through dangerous short cuts and slippery slopes to find the terrible scene in front of her.

The humble walls were shredded, the kitchen shed was on fire, and at the doorstep, Lady Valerin's body lay still. Johnley, Azurean, and Wessen, the three of the youngest children in the orphanage, lay sprawled near her, with the small abandoned infant that was found last week smushed under Lady Valerin's arms.

All their bodies were intact and whole from where Nimona could see them, but the vast bed of red snow ruined any illusion of life for Nimona. They wondered if their wail was loud enough to reach the village below. The unsettling surety of their fates didn't stop Nimona from rushing to press her fingers to the area in the neck. Pressing gently like older brother Ballister had told her to. Hopelessness increasing as none of them held any gentle pulse, their skins feeling cold to her fingertips, and they swallowed back bile as they flipped over Azurean to see bruised and blotted skin give way to a savage laceration that spilled her intestines to the snow.

Nimona's eyes burned with tears, and she didn't think she had the strength to go inside to see who else was lost to the gore, who else she had lost while sleeping free in the wild. But she had to, she owed it to them to find those who still hung on.

This she prayed, as she stepped into the threshold.

But prayers were not meant to be heard, and Nimona wondered if the gods would ever hear her out if her vocal chords shredded from how loud she was crying. Every room, every corridor, every tile of the floor seemed to have blood stains on them, and every body she had passed so far were so brutally desecrated that she didn't have the strength to look further than the lack of the rise and fall of their chests, if they were even intact.

She wondered back to a story that Ballister had told her, of demons that plagued the land, hungry only for human flesh and their misery. If a demon was responsible for this, she hoped it was full and sleepy so she could find it fast and slip her knife between their stomach, spilling out the rest of her family's bodies and make the demon repent for orphaning her again.

The last room was hers, hers and Ballister's as the eldest children in the orphanage and the ones most responsible for keeping the income flowing, they had spent so many sleepless nights sharing their crazy ramblings about life and what Bal remembered of his parents, their hazy days with chores and work with calls for 'Boss' was shouted everywhere ever since Nimona shared to the other kids how perplexed it would make Bal, Nimona's early days being taught by the man with the heavy feeling of contentment. Even if Ballister was known as older brother by everyone in the orphanage, to her, he was like a father.

Would she survive seeing their room torn and stained red with blood?

Would she survive seeing her father figure, in whatever state his body was in, still and lifeless?

Would she survive being alone again?

She finds herself scared at how the answer to those questions calmed her. No, she wouldn't survive. Because if she found Ballister dead beyond this door, and was unable to find the killer by sun fall, she would dig a hole big enough for all of the bodies that now littered the orphanage, and herself as well.