Work Text:
She isn’t as forgiving as she used to be. There was a time when she would’ve understood, a time when she could have moved on, but she isn’t a little girl anymore, not with the blackened blood of a corrupt monarch on her hands. Not when she has two bridges to burn.
It’s not just the one who hurt her, the one she looked up to, the one who she let replace her mother in her heart, just for a moment; it’s the one who did the same and was welcomed back with open arms. Nobody gets to tell her what her place is, not now, not ever, but after they tried to shut her out, she knows it is no longer with them.
So she salvages bits from her other bridges, the collateral in her spiral down to isolation; the tank from a father who barely deserves the word, ten years too late at least, made to hold his inventions but taken to hold the land's lifeblood instead; the staff from a boy who doesn’t need it anymore, and the broken bits of his abuser’s, hacked together to funnel that lifeblood; the key is all she takes from the one she’s running from, broken open to lead where she chooses, to the hinder stars and not the world that bore her.
She considers the cloak too, but she’s breaking that tie, so she leaves it bundled on the doorstop under a once-borrowed jacket and a note, and takes off in the early hours. She is the child of no world now; two burned her, and she will not let a third in.
In time, there will be stories of a world-walking child, a witchling-girl with a two-headed staff that crackles with invented magic, a canister on her back full of shimmering black ichor, and cards up her sleeve that flash and spark when she touches them. And a mother will cry for a broken promise she never earned the right to ask, and two old witches will hear, at distance, and blame each other for the rift, and the house will be silent and cold.