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They’d sparred together innumerable times as teenagers, as young adults, as devout followers of the Solari teachings. Leona had largely been the victor of these bouts, able to throw her heavier weight into each swing and thrust of her blade, able to more readily bear the brunt of the hits that Diana had landed on her in turn. By all accounts now, older and wiser, filled with the devastating holy fire of the sun, Leona should’ve bested a heretic in close combat easily—either in this clash or any of the previous. But before, it’d been Diana the Solari she’d dueled.
This Diana, the Lunari, fought her with all the rapacity of a cornered animal.
Leona grimaced as the silvered blade screamed across the face of her shield, surprised to find herself nearly buckling under the raw magic deflected. “What will it take?” Diana hissed, shoving her weight back to resteady herself. Molten moonlight dripped from her blade, from her teeth, burned in her eyes. “What will it fucking take for you to stop following me? ”
It had been the third time in a year that Leona had managed to track her down again after Diana’s destruction of the Solari’s inner sanctum—after Leona’s own blaze and immolation and ascent atop the peak of the mountain herself. The third time that Leona had approached her with open hands, open arms, pleading to speak with her one-time lover.
The third time that Leona’s own reflexes kept Diana’s blade from punching through her armor the instant she appeared.
“Diana, this is madness ,” Leona grunted, parrying Diana’s blade with a gilded flash of her own. Diana showed her grit teeth in a semblance of a snarl, forearms straining as Leona locked their weapons in place. “I came here to talk. I do not wish to fight you—”
Diana’s eyes burned brighter. A flick of the wrist caught Leona’s sword in the hook of her khopesh and then she wrenched it from her palm, sending Leona pitching forward as her sword went scattering across the forest floor. Diana snarled in her face, bracing her forearm across the shield between them. “I wouldn’t wish to fight me, either,” she dared coldly. She drew back again.
Leona scarcely braced her shield before her in time to take the full force of Diana’s lunge, and the roar of fell magic rushing her did little to overpower Diana’s enraged scream at the blocked attack. “Fight back, ” she demanded, the razor edge of her blade biting deep into the gilt face of her shield.
“I will not,” Leona said, voice tight with the effort of holding her at bay.
Diana growled. “Then die. ” She twisted out of the locked clash and whipped back around, slashing the air before her to throw a bolt of magic against Leona’s chest. She stumbled back, grimacing at the burning cold that struck her, the ache striking deep to the bone.
“Diana, it doesn’t have to be like this,” Leona insisted, still holding her shield between the two of them as Diana began to circle her, a predator of the night searching for her opening. “The two of us—we can fix this, you know we can. We can change things back to the way they should be—”
“You’ve got a lot of damn nerve talking to me about change ,” Diana spat, squaring her shoulders incredulously. “The golden child of the Rakkor, the general of the Ra’Horak—every change you got to go through was all for the better. The one time I changed, it was for the worse! ”
With a hoarse shout, Diana lunged again in a blaze of moonlight, khopesh raised, magic crackling around her before slamming into Leona’s shield with all the force of an avalanche, pushing the pair of them back half a dozen feet till Leona’s sabatons caught traction again and dug into the soil, grinding them to a halt. Diana gasped raggedly, magic pooling from her fingertips, dripping down her blade till it burned with pearlescent light. It made the shadows beneath her bloodshot violet eyes look all the darker.
“Before, it was just that I wasn’t good enough, ” Diana seethed, bracing her gauntlet against Leona’s shield. Leona held fast, staring at her with wide, horrified eyes through the gaps between her shield’s ornaments. “I wasn’t good enough for the Solari, just wasn’t good enough for the chosen of the sun, was I? ”
“ Diana—! ”
“And now? ” Diana screamed over Leona’s protests, voice raw. “ Now I’m not good at all! ”
The blade of her khopesh screeched over Leona’s shield, cutting deep, a furious surge of magic splintering through the cracks in her shield and bringing Leona to her knees with a muted groan as the cold cut her deeper than Targon’s winds ever had, the ground beneath them freezing and shattering all in the same breath.
Leona waited for the crippling blow, eyes clenched shut to brace against the agony.
A heartbeat.
Another.
Diana’s breaths came in sharp, clipped wheezes as she leaned heavily against Leona’s shield. Must’ve cracked a rib in the scuffle, Leona thought distantly.
“And you... won’t even fight back,” Diana whispered, half-muffled against her forearm. She sounded more exhausted than Leona had ever heard her. Leona knew that weariness well, now. The weariness of millennia’s worth of thoughts and lifetimes and experiences on the mind, on the shoulders. The kind that wasn’t meant for humans to bear. A clatter: Diana’s blade dropped to the ground from a trembling hand, scorched at the hilt now. Then, a dull thud as Diana sank to her knees, still gasping for breath in pained, whistling gulps.
Leona timidly lowered her shield, just a little, still on guard. Diana stared listlessly back, those once-vibrant violet eyes dull and damp with spent rage, the kohl lining her eyes dripping silently down her cheeks.
The smile Diana offered her was utterly devoid of humor. Another streak of kohl-stained tears tracked down from her left eye. “You actually cared for me, didn’t you?” she murmured, weary, broken with the realization.
The shield came down a little further. “I told you I did.” Leona hesitated a moment. “I still do.”
“You wanted to kill me,” Diana said, blunt as ever. Leona winced. “I saw it clear as day in your eyes that... that night. You followed me to kill me. You’ve been following me ever since then. And now you claim to...?” She trailed off, weary eyes losing focus for a moment. Diana swiped the side of her gloved hand over her cheek, her mouth. Studied the smear of color as if she half expected to find blood. “That’s heartless, even for you.”
Leona hesitated a fraction of a second longer before slowly, timidly lowering her shield to the ground entirely. Diana stared blankly at it, wary, uncertain, uncomprehending. “Heartless how?” Leona chanced, watching her carefully. Diana didn’t move, didn’t look up. She looked somehow smaller now that she’d finally burned through her rage and terror. More like the Diana that Leona had grown up with—like the one she’d fallen in love with. Older, certainly. More haunted, somehow. More tired than anything else.
But it was still her , wasn’t it?
She tried again: “Diana?”
And Diana looked up.
“We’re confused , not blind,” she said at last, voice something of a wry deadpan. Her eyes seemed perhaps clearer than before. “I can feel Her brighter than anything else in this damned wood. You climbed the summit yourself, didn’t you?”
Leona smiled despite herself. Diana always had been sharp as a whip. “I did.” The warmth within her flared in something like pride.
“Then how can you say—?” Diana cut herself off, her eyes darting back to her blade for a scarce moment, frantic, wary, confused with her own thoughts. “It was your people who killed us.” Diana’s voice cracked with grief. “All of us. Why let me live now?”
“Diana—” Leona reached out to take her hand, and came up short when Diana flinched back. Too intimate, apparently. Required too much trust. Trust that she wasn’t sure Diana still had in her. She bit back the hurt. “You’re confused. Both of you. I... she hasn’t... you...? Haven’t been here in... a very long time,” Leona said, haltingly. “You don’t... remember everything.”
“I remember enough.”
“You don’t, if you think I know all I know now and still want to kill you.”
Diana lifted her head again, and Leona was struck briefly by the glimmer of starlight in her eyes. “So explain.” Leona nearly startled again to feel Diana’s smaller hand slip, trembling, into her own. “Please.”
Leona began to grin despite herself. “You haven’t stopped to wonder why the two of us, specifically, were chosen?”
A ghost of a smile twitched at the corner of Diana’s mouth. “I’ve scarcely stopped to sleep , Leona.” The sound of her name of Diana’s lips made Leona’s chest seize in a pleasant way.
Leona closed both hands carefully over Diana’s, squeezing fondly, brushing her thumbs over her palm, her knuckles. Diana’s weary smile lingered despite herself. “Did you ever wonder who the first Lunari was?” Leona asked instead.
“We don’t remember.”
Clearly. Still, Leona smiled outright then, bringing Diana’s gloved hand up to her face, pressing a chaste kiss to her fingertips. “It was the Sun, naturally,” Leona said, nearly laughing with the sheer joy of the knowledge. Diana stared at her in muted bewilderment. Leona pressed a second kiss, lingering, to the bare inside of her wrist. “Who else but the Sun would have first seen the Moon’s ever-changing light, and loved her for the beauty of it?”
Diana was silent for a long moment, eyes wide and glassy, jaw tight and trembling. Her breaths slipped back into shallow, shaking gulps. Her ribs again, Leona thought. They’d have to see a healer before—well. She didn’t know before what, exactly. She didn’t even know if Diana believed her.
The solid weight of Diana nearly falling into her, though, seemed to say yes—as did the way she curled closer into Leona’s form when Leona tentatively wrapped her arms around Diana’s waist and pulled her as close as their combined armor would allow.
She war courteous enough not to mention the silent tears that dampened her shoulder.
Rather, Leona nuzzled into the soft, silver-white hair tucked behind Diana’s ear, murmuring soothingly to her. The color was new, she thought—a stark contrast to the midnight black locks she used to run her fingers through. But nothing else had changed, it seemed. She still wept silently, when she wept at all. She still weighed nothing, even in plate armor. She still smelled like snow, like ink and paper, like still-green pine needles.
She still felt like home.