Work Text:
The first vision a seer receives is invariably the vision of her own demise.
It is a thing fragmented, devoid of context: a shattered glimpse into the one future that is certain and destined and unavoidable, the truest and most certain of all one’s prophecy. It is twofold a promise safely kept and a reminder, however grim, of the mortality of choice and the efficacy, or convergence, of fate. It is at once welcome and farewell, both the breaking of new dawn and its twilight.
For Rose Lalonde, age 13, it is a nightmare.
It is a slow march to the end, a calm before storm and a quiet before slaughter. It is the slow, deafening drone of silence that chokes words to die in throats unspoken. It is a quiet torture, waiting.
It is flashes of blood and iron; a hot wind and the sharpest pain she has ever felt. It is a fractured red and grey and fuschia, it is a splintered dark sky, broken shards of a final, dying gaze. It is the wheeze of collapsing lungs and the arrhythmic drum of a heartbeat fading.
It is a golden trident and white wands and a pair of broken aviator sunglasses.
It is darkness that fades to nothing, or perhaps to a different dream. For a time her conscious self floats as suspended upon a great ocean, as light fades to darkness fades to light and time pinwheels around her in the not-sky above, the sensation of eyes that are somehow soft in their hardness and the snatched hints of echoing conversations that have already happened, will already happen, to you but not to you, you wonderful, beautiful, prophesied, liberating, poor, accursed child. The path you would walk ends in a shallow grave. Teleutôn alupos, young Delphi. Can you forgive the world what it asks of you?
Rose Lalonde, age 13, does not have an answer, but she wakes with tears on her cheeks all the same.
She does not cry out, in waking, like a child plagued with such terrors might. She does not scream, not for anger nor for fear nor for the ghost of her mother nor for her foster parents nor for anyone or anything at all. She does not scream and so nothing comes, no arms come to wrap themselves around her and whisper calm quietings as she stifles choked sobs against their chest. No, no, there is none of that childishness. (She will come to regret this, a lifetime from now.)
Instead, the young seer deftly untangles herself from the snares of her bedsheets and clicks on the lamp at her nightstand, sliding of the mattress which groans at her departure. She attempts summarily to ignore the trembling in her hands as she scrubs the memory of wetness from her cheeks and clutches at her chest as though she can calm the pounding of her heart by reaching inside her ribcage and quelling it herself. She breathes, or tries to, or remembers how, and walks silently to the desk held just within the light of the bedside lamp. She lights a candle.
She begins to write.