Work Text:
based on
The View Between Villages
by Noah Kahan
-
Fang Runin doesn't quite know where she's going until she gets there.
The remains of the city are encircled by a once-great, now-ruined gate. Where once a longer message was engraved on the gate, only one word remains emblazoned upon it.
Eternal.
What a joke.
Still, it doesn't quite strike Rin where here is, until she passes through the once-magnificent gate now half-burned down. That mountain just over there is so familiar, towering over the tops of charred houses even with its distance.
It takes her a moment to remember why she knows it. She doesn’t recognize this town. But that mountain beyond the town—Rin knows that mountain. She squints at it for a moment.
Everything else is too burnt, blackened, destroyed. Too desolate to be recognizable—
Just like her?
A dry laugh catches her throat painfully on its way out. Funny that Sinegard had to burn before she could ever feel she belongs here.
She wonders for a moment, when it burned two years ago, had it burned just for her, knowing she would return? Knowing she would be the only one who did?
She rips the the idea from the forefront of her thoughts and stuffs it into the overcrowded corner of her mind where all her unwanted thoughts go.
Of course it didn't burn for her. Only if she doesn't know better, maybe it would be easier to believe.
" Air in my lungs
'Til the road begins "
The broken city welcomes her back with open arms and unbarred gates—The same gates she once entered through, long ago, back when her world hadn't been ripped apart by the contents of history just yet. Five years ago.
Not even a blink in the grand scheme of things, yet a full fourth of her life thus far.
She stares at the mountain where that last quarter of her life began. The only part of her life that matters—
She lies to herself. There is no part of her life that matters.
But this city once mattered to her life. The first in a chain reaction of toppling dominoes, toppling cities, toppling lives.
It took her some time to recognize the city, yes, but even if every tree burned down on that mountain in the distance, Rin has climbed up and down it too many times to forget. Funny that the memory clings to her, when she's forgotten everything else.
Rin has no time to remember. War after war, battle after battle, fighting herself.
Fighting to keep herself. Fighting to lose herself? Both? Is that a question she can even try to answer anymore?
She finds herself in the fighting, or she loses herself in the fighting. She doesn't know which is which, which is better, which is true.
She fights the last memories she has of people so often that she can no longer recall her first memories of them.
When she can, it is bits and pieces, two waves from the ocean of the memory itself.
Rin treasures the memories she once made here, guards them like a pirate would a chest of gold. She carries the chest with her but she never opens it.
And those memories are stuck in the chest together, that little treasure trove that she can no longer reach for. The key is lost to her, to time, fallen somewhere—Where, she does not know.
Locked away in her mind where so much of the rest of her also lingers, the memories mingle and meld into each other. The lines between them blur sometimes, such that there are moments when she doesn't know if she only dreamed up the time when life was simpler. If it really happened.
A princess's light, high laugh, a melody ringing like bells through the woods at night.
Simpler times. What Rin will give to crawl back through time towards that laugh, to somehow curl up and take refuge within the sound. To have it tinkle in her ears forever until it becomes the only thing she's ever known.
The grumbles of third-years assigned to show new students around the Academy, music to the ears of those not assigned such tedious tasks. A task even a prince is not spared from, which makes her all the more gleeful for it.
The wreckage of her heart twinges, she almost feels it physically. She shoves that memory back into the chest, stuffs it through the keyhole. Why she's kept that memory close is a mystery to her, why it remains when most others have left her to her wretched devices.
Perhaps this city is the key to those memories so long-ago locked away. Or are they forever gone? She doesn't know.
But Rin doesn't need the key. She doesn't want the key. She should leave, yes, she has places to be.
But she has never really done what she should, anyway.
So still she wanders in farther from Sinegard's East Gate, she retraces her steps from so many years past. Rin drags her gaze over each once-magnificent, now-broken rooftop and every crumbled wall and every unburied skeleton.
Does she want to look? It doesn't matter. There is nothing else to look at. And looking back at her are the changes she never would have expected even two years prior.
The city has been sacked of anything it was once worth. Pieces of the buildings have been stripped away, not by fire or time, but by human hands. The Mugenese do love to take the buildings apart when they can, to reinforce their own bases or build their fires.
She assumes they couldn't do more than that. They couldn't make laborers of the Sinegardians who remained alive, couldn't establish their version of a mini-government here the way they do with the southern villages.
And so instead, the Sinegardians burned.
There are more half-charred planks of wood in some collapsed structures than there should be, parts looking like they were ripped from other places and thrown in buildings they don’t belong in.
She tries not to look too closely, but she already knows why this was done. Broken skeletons poke out from under the rubble.
Rin knows just by seeing it. The Federation soldiers forced several civilians into one place and set the place afire. They tore wood off other buildings to fuel the flames further, higher, kill the remaining civilians faster. Firewood helped flesh burn worse.
They could do nothing else here. So they wrought havoc until they were satisfied, and then they left.
Sinegard wasn't just taken over two years ago—It was burned, it was emptied, it was broken. The survivors ran from the Federation, and the Federation made examples of those who didn't, so that no one would think to return.
And it remains that way, no one has returned.
No one but Rin.
Now that the people of Sinegard are long-gone, the other forces of nature have begun to reclaim the city, foliage creeping over ruined structures already. A spider skitters away from under her shoe right as she brings her foot down on the web.
" As the last of the bugs
Leave their homes again "
Bugs and plants—Maybe some small animals. All that remains in this once-great city.
Rin remembers seeing this place for the first time, all the wonders the city held for her, all the noise. She sees it for the first time again today, and this is no longer a city. The fires have burned away that title from this land, the armies razed all its once-magnificent names to the ground.
There are no more merchants yelling to market their wares, no more children running about. They are still here, Rin wagers, most of them, but now they lay in piles of bones and ash all along the roads.
She stands among what remains of them, dead along the streets they once brought to life.
Rin shouldn't continue deeper into what Sinegard has become, but she is always held back and held down by the past, isn't she?
She tells herself this is no different.
—
“ And I'm splitting the road down the middle
For a minute the world seemed so simple ”
She wanders the streets that were once so crowded and smelly, the one she traversed daily in her first year. There was a pig, she remembers, she named it after Sunzi? She named it Sunzi.
She chokes out a dry heave of a laugh at the thought.
And Sunzi—the pig, not the strategist—belonged to a widow. Rin strains for a second to remember her name, having almost all-but-forgotten about her. The Widow Maung.
Out of curiosity she walks down the alley to Widow Maung's shop, or where she thinks it might once have been. She isn't sure it's the right alley, she's barely sure enough that this is even the right district. She only knows here is where the meatpacking district once was, because of all the animal carcasses and bones lying about.
These buildings are burnt and crumbling, yet the structures still stand. Barely. The rows are built so close together that now the higher levels of the buildings have teetered forward and crashed into each other. The wreckages hold each other from collapsing fully, and Rin should feel, perhaps, a bit more caution walking underneath them. But she doesn't.
The door is intact enough for Rin to be able to tell that these are the signs of a break-in.
Inside. it's all desperately unfamiliar. She can't make out anything of how the room once looked.
What is recognizable is the skeleton lying there, the same height as she recalls the Widow Maung to have been. What is recognizable are the two small pig skeletons lying beside her corpse, not nearly old enough to be taken to the butcher, not even sizably worthy to eat in wartime. At least not during the early parts of war when Sinegard had burned.
The pig skeletons lay splayed as if a fire had tackled them and shoved them down to their knees. The human skeleton lies on its back, almost as if sleeping—If not for the wrangled neck, twisted almost fully backwards.
It plays out like a story in her mind, she watches from a distant angle. Mugenese soldiers break into the Widow Maung's establishment, snap her neck and set piglets aflame just to laugh at their squeals.
Of course, there would have been more pigs in the building then. But the soldiers, Rin assumes, wanted to take the bigger ones to eat. Just like someone ate Sunzi four years ago.
She remembers the day she first came down this path with the strange ageless teacher only she could encounter, when her teacher introduced her to Sunzi and then made her carry it up and down a mountain every morning at the ass crack of dawn.
" Feel the rush of my blood
I'm seventeen again "
How her teacher had changed since then, what he had become. How she has changed, too.
Like father, like daughter? In this one way, and one way alone.
She wrenches the idea from her mind again, like she does so many other ideas. Rin doesn't want to think about this now, perhaps not ever, not when it is all too late for anything to change.
It has always been too late. A moment passes, and then a hundred more fall into the past like dominoes as retribution, and Rin can never stop it all.
Perhaps if things beyond her reach had gone differently. Perhaps if she could have grown to find the ability to change things earlier.
Only if the world doesn't enjoy tearing things like homes and cities and people apart.
Only if it doesn't relish more yet in tearing even non-tangible things apart. Things like her memories.
It loves most to rip up like paper the places she once made them.
—
Thin clouds obscure the afternoon sun as Rin retraces her steps back down the alley, out the other end of what was once the meatpacking district, and up the mountain pass.
Something deep inside her clenches harshly as she reaches the stone stairway winding up this mountain she once knew like the back of her hand. She doesn't know what it is—Her heart, maybe, but she doubts she has one left.
Her eyes wander, picking apart details in every crack and crevice she passes. The stone steps are just as intact as ever. Fire and human enemies have done nothing to them. Stone, like the Chuluu Korikh, like the mountain she once sent crashing upon the wind god and its incarnation.
Stone is more impervious to destructive endeavors than anything else left here—She knows because it is more or less the only thing left here. Stone and stone alone, but not the Academy which rested upon the grounds that the stairs led to, not the structures and halls built upon it.
No, everything else is burnt and crumbling. Not ashes, but still, not enough left to matter. As if the job wasn't seen well-enough through. Perhaps the Mugenese assumed no one would return to the Academy itself if they destroyed the city anyway.
A beautiful woman. Her son, a face just as beautiful but twisted with some resentful expression. An old man wheezing on his way up the stone steps.
An old tune drags its way up to the surface of her memory, something she used to hum during her daily treks when she grew bored. It feels foreign in her dry throat, but she lets the sound crawl up anyway. A hymn to days long gone, but then again, the same could be said of any words once uttered here.
The off-key sound Rin hums now is nothing worthy of a hymn—A tribute to temporal happiness and nothing more.
The sound is a deep, hoarse thrum in her airways, something that once served as a distraction. Something that now does the opposite.
Everything here does the opposite.
Wherever Rin looks in this damn city, she sees memories. All that is left of Sinegard is memories.
She nears the first tier of the Academy and finds them in the silence that she never once heard before. Vaguely in the back of her mind, a faint, muffled whisper suggests she rip her ears out.
She would rather face silence by her own hand than the silence that comes with death in the only place she might ever have called home.
But she doesn't heed the urge, her hands stilling at her sides. She stares down at her feet, the worn and war-torn ground, where the stone stairway lets off onto the first tier of the Academy.
Rin's feet become leaden, unwilling to step off the stairway and onto the tier itself. Something disgustingly heavy settles in her stomach at the thought.
It's not too late to turn back—But she wonders what else she might remember if she goes on, goes further.
Rin is not one for turning back. If this winds up being just another entry on her ever-lengthening list of mistakes, the list that makes up her life, so be it.
She forces her foot onto the path diverging from the stairs, and forces another in front of it, again and again. It doesn't get easier.
The path leads to what was once a meditation room, then the girls' dormitories, and now is just the one ruined building of many.
Charred walls couldn't support a roof now caved in, a blackened pile of rubble.
" I am not scared of death
I've got dreams again "
Rin didn't particularly like her roommates in her Sinegard days. She does now, so in retrospect, she can overlook the childish disputes now.
And so she can acknowledge now that there were nights, even back then, when they could forget their little feuds even without the cover of sleep.
In their third year, just before their lives had ended and their deaths had begun, there had been a rather skittish first-year student sharing their dorm.
Niang murmured stories to the girl on some nights, taking her on as something like a sister. Sometimes Venka added details that only she had noticed. Sometimes Venka's interruptions came off so ridiculous that Rin had to laugh and tell the first-year how it really was, a third version of one story.
Maybe Venka's additions really weren't ridiculous. Maybe Rin simply thought that they were because it was Venka saying them.
Venka laughed at Rin's version of the story each time, albeit mockingly, and Rin had returned the taunts with her own, but...
Rin stares, almost uncomprehendingly, at the remains of the old dormitory. Even if only to bring each other down, they had laughed together here.
Children would be children. And now soldiers are soldiers.
She presses her lips into a thin line and forces herself to look away. She won't venture closer, because there is nothing more to see there anyway.
Instead, she turns to the burnt forest, to the path she can't quite see and can't quite remember. But she knows where it goes.
Strange to think it was five years ago that she first took this forest path, strange to think Sinegard is already two years in her past. If nothing had gone wrong, Rin might be graduating soon.
Not two years have passed since she's left, and new trees have already begun to grow in between the burnt, broken, dead ones. The first bit of life returning to Sinegard.
But it fills Rin with a muted sense of rage, almost, something so faint and far back in her skull that she barely registers it. So distant, so different from her usual anger. It's more like spite, a thin, cloying bitterness drying her mouth.
She tramples more than a few sprouts and saplings with no glance back at them as she continues on through the old path, lip curled.
The earth does not get to heal from the blood of those who will never walk it again.
Rin shoves through the skeleton of the forest as she takes the shortcut to the main training hall, and the last traces of the sun slink below the horizon.
The hall stands better intact than the dorms are. A wall has crumbled, the roof partly-fallen. But a clear path through the rubble remains to lead to the basement stairs.
" It's just me and the curve of the valley
And there is meaning on Earth, I am happy "
Rin can almost hear the shouts from behind the veil of silence that has settled over the place. She can almost recall the initial confusion of the first time she came here at night.
Cheers resounding in a great room. Bets placed. A group of nervous first-years ushered out of bed, they knew not why.
Most of those faces are nothing more than smudges in her mind now. Only a few remain whole. And fewer remain alive.
She picks her way through the rubble, peering down into the hole where the staircase to the basement had once gone. Now the staircase is gone, fallen away.
If Rin steps to the side, crouches, and title her head a certain angle, she can see a fighting pit.
She can't remember the last fight she saw here, because Rin watched it simply expecting to see another soon.
No one remembers one show in a hundred when they are under the illusion that they will see their hundred-and-first soon enough anyway.
No, Rin can't remember the last fight she saw in this room she can no longer go down to, but she can remember the first.
She doesn't very well want to remember the first, but the memory carves itself into her mind's eye. Before she can scramble to shove it into the chest of prized, unwanted recollection, it replays in her mind.
Magnificent brawls, unmatched fighter. Dark skin like hers—certainly a first in this city, but—Crimson eyes. Dark hair, like ink.
The illusion of strength.
The bitterness coating her tongue grows thicker at the recollection. She can't ever really feel the handprint just below her sternum. It doesn't hurt.
But she is too aware of its presence all the same now. Her skin crawls at the thought.
It almost makes her sick.
—
" Passed Alger Brook Road,
I'm over the bridge "
The second tier holds not many memories for Rin, beyond those first days. She was barred from these training grounds then, and still feels no need to step closer now.
But she watches from a distance as she has before, quiet where the clash of weapons once filled the air.
Rin's gaze rests upon the skeleton of the mimosa tree in the courtyard that she can see, even from the outside, because one wall has crumbled halfway to dust.
The tree has fallen, cracked and dead. The stump stands, but that is all—It no longer stands tall enough for anyone to fall out of, and consequently, no branches are left for evasive Lore masters to sit and sing lewd brothel tunes from to distract students in class.
Rin no longer recalls the verses or the name of the song, only that something like this did happen once.
She looks upon it for a moment longer, something beginning to churn in her stomach.
But she forces herself to continue up the stairs before she has to acknowledge it.
Before long, the third tier comes into view—the main hall, the infirmary, the Medicine classroom.
Night has begun to secure its grasp onto the world now, and the clouds obscure the moon. There is little light to see with.
Rin can barely make out the shapes of the buildings in this darkness. There, on the left, she barely recognizes the mess hall.
Chatter livening up the room each night, food fights the night after final exams. Flip a tray over the wiry-haired genius's head and bolt, write remorseful essays for the principal, in lamplight late at night beside him.
How did she meet Kitay, Rin wonders momentarily. But even this, she doesn't remember. There is no bell that rings at the question. There is only a startling echo of a younger Kitay's voice turning the question back to her like a knife. She shuts her eyes for a second, shuts this memory off.
Futile, almost. There is little difference when she shuts her eyes. She can barely see in front of her anyway.
Heads bow to accompany over-the-top apologies; hiding behind flowery words are two twin intentions to reenact all this next year anyway.
Rin glances down at her hand and entertains the idea of staving off the dark with her flames, if only to see better. But her anchor isn't here. Even if he were, it dishonors so many past memories to bring even the idea of fire back here, it dishonors Sinegard itself.
Let the dead here rest in their nights, no need to carry their dying thoughts back here to them. She has already trampled on everything she has ever known, and for anything she hasn't, she figures she might as well extend the discourtesy—but here? Even if she could, Rin won't dare.
She glances towards where the stairway diverges onto the third tier and she ignores it. That is where the infirmary used to be, and while the rest of the Academy has been relatively lacking in corpses compared to the city, she figures that there will be some left in the infirmary.
The people who could not be saved in the time before everyone else left, and the people who chose to stay behind with them.
She sets her jaw, forces herself to turn away from this tier with corpses of her memories, almost trips in the dark, and keeps climbing.
—
Clouds have shifted to unveil a tiny sliver of moon as her only light source.
Weak moonlight filters in through the bits of broken wall and cracks in the ceiling of the Strategy classroom. Everything here is broken, coated in dust mixed with ash, unmoving in testament to the passing of time.
Vines have begun to crawl over the walls and remaining furniture. For a moment, Rin catches a faint scuttling noise before it fades into quiet.
She sits unmoving on a crumbling bench, one of the only ones left. Slowly, she clenches and unclenches a fist in discomfort while she looks around.
Rin is sitting at the same seat she always sat at before. It roots her in place, locks her there. Perhaps if she sits there long enough, the vines will take her in their grip and keep her here, add her to the snapshot of history that this room has already become.
She never did want to leave, anyway.
But she did.
So now she must face consequences, must attend a funeral for a past self she has not yet forced herself to face. A memorial for a person she used to be renders her nearly unable to move.
Unable, but not nearly as unwilling. There is a great repulsion in sitting right where a different person once sat every day. It sickens her to sit here, but she must see it through. There is nothing she can do now.
Rin has tainted many memories before with only her presence, and tonight she taints her own, too.
She leaves bloodstains that only she can see on the remembrances of everything that has ever happened here.
Her wretched existence and its birthplace. She wouldn't mind it becoming her deathbed, too, but she knows that will not happen.
Still, let her imagine. She doesn't get to imagine.
Let her imagine, if only here, only for now.
" A minute from home
but I feel so far from it "
The moonlight falls through cracks in strange patterns on the desk in front of her. She can so clearly picture a younger Kitay beside her, trying his best to answer the mind-boggling questions thrown at him, eyes alight with excited, free-racing thought.
Untouched by war. Unbound by death. Unmarred by her.
She stares down at the empty spot beside her where Kitay once sat, she picks at the memory like an infected scab. Tentatively, an arm reaches out to touch it with a phantom of a hand no longer there.
Ghost reaching for ghost.
The stump of her hand brushes with nothing but air, and withdraws the outstretched arm abruptly as if stung. Rin looks in slight disgust at the empty space where her hand should be and drops her arm in her lap.
Then she doesn't move for a long time.
—
Some clouds have shifted, and a couple of stars blink into sight high above her.
Rin stands in the garden, walks along the many paths she used to wander so often in the past.
The higher tiers of the Academy have been left less destroyed than the lower ones, given the wetter and higher environments. Despite this, Rin has no intention to visit the temple at the top, or spare the waterfall beside it half a glance. It is the only thing here that remains the same.
The same cannot be said of Jiang's garden, for even given the lack of damage to the rest of the tiers, there is nothing of the drugs left here. All have been burned away or taken.
Now all that is left is the trees, the ground itself, and a couple of cobwebs bobbing with the cold breeze. Rin remembers those stones over there hurt the most to fall on, that spot in the corner was where she used to meditate with Jiang.
Pointed remarks that might be jokes or might be insults, denied requests to let loose of body and mind. Vague questions that irritate beyond words.
Hunger for power latches like a parasite onto a yearning for peace. Monster-keeper tries—and fails—to prevent the birth of a monster.
Two sides of the same coin, or two very different coins, she will never know. There is much Rin has not known, there is much she will never know.
But here, there is nothing to know anyway.
It's so empty here, hollow. A shell of itself. Here, the one place in all of Sinegard where she has spent the most time. Here, where she has learned to fight and learned to reach the gods.
Here, where it all began, with Jiang.
" The death of my dog, the stretch of my skin
It's all washin' over me, I'm angry again "
Some string holding the last of Rin's sense together, deep down, snaps, when she remembers this. Something else deep within begins to unravel.
It's all him, isn't it?
He started this. He chose to teach her and he shaped so much in his own action and inaction.
It's his fault, isn't it?
Maybe she should tell him—At least maybe she should try.
Rin chokes on the words she wants him to hear, but he will never hear anything again. The words claw at the insides of her throat in their intent to reach him, but they never will.
She wants to shout at Jiang, ask him why he had to take her under his wing. She is not usually one for what-ifs, but in this place, there is nothing else left if not for those what-ifs.
She has not been left alone in such a vast, desolate place in some time. It undoes what little is left of rationality.
There is certainly no other place that serves as so many successive slaps to Rin's face, the way that Sinegard does.
Here is her worst reminder of all she once fought to hold in her hands, for just a fleeting moment, before it all inevitably slipped between her fingers and fell away like sand.
She has nothing left here except the imaginings of what could've been, if only—
No. Deep down, she knows there never could've been another way. But it doesn't matter still.
Rin craves something to blame, and perhaps it's proper to blame the very reason she exists.
So she pushes the burden of condemnation to his remembrance, standing beside the corner where Jiang meditated in, and she murmurs the names of her dead.
His name is among them, but still she must scorn him, scorn the memories because there is nothing else left here.
Here, now, what else can she do?
“ The things that I lost here, the people I knew
They got me surrounded for a mile or two ”
The curses rip from her mouth quietly but as readily as if they've been waiting years to be given voice.
They have.
So, standing in this old, cursed skeleton of a garden, she clenches her fist and asks Jiang why.
Who better to ask that question than someone who did not deserve to be asked such things, someone who could not answer?
Why?
Why what?
What Jiang should be blamed for, exactly, Rin isn't sure. No matter that all this was the only way it ever could've gone.
Rin can dismiss that fact, she can drive it to the furthest recesses of her mind, if it means she can keep condemning the ghost of her father.
If there is one thing Rin is good at, it is her disgusting anger.
—
By the time Rin decides she has had enough of scorning the dead, dawn has arrived and exhaustion begins to settle in her bones like an ocean pulling her down to its depths.
She stumbles back down the mountain path, the first rays of dawn light reaching over the horizon. The sun melts the sky, turning the abyssal dark of a certain prince's hair into the brighter orange of her flame.
Rin will never return here again, this she knows.
Sinegard is a city of memories and death and ash. It is everything that Rin is, yet she will never belong here until she, too, is dead and gone.
She fights a yawn as she almost trips on a step the third time tonight. An empty city and a sleepless night have brought her guard down, if ever so slightly.
Her mind's chasm filled to the brim in that garden, and it overflowed, and out spilled the ugliest words Rin has ever spoken, for one undeserving of them.
And she knows she would do it again.
But for the moment, her mind's coffers of hate are as empty as they ever get—Not at all close to empty, but not worth speaking. For now.
Ghosts distract her from her rage to greet her everywhere she goes. Their calls follow her as she reaches the base of the mountains and reenters the city.
Merchants, friends, and teachers. Deals for purchasing wares, field assignment instructions, her name uttered by voices she no longer hears.
Rin keeps walking until those voices whispering in her ears are gone, until her only thought is putting one foot in front of the other.
Sinegard is a part of her past, and nothing else, she tells herself.
She sidesteps the skeletons the same way she did on her way in, she ducks under the teetering buildings and passes through the streets as if she is no more than a spirit with no one to haunt.
Rin wanders along the old marketplace, collapsed booths and stalls lining all sides of the street. Dusty, broken wares are scattered across the street, and the wind rolls dirt and pebbles along the road.
The rising sun shines on something tiny that the wind has just coaxed out from the shadows—Rin crouches to look at it and finds it is a singular pearl. From an abandoned jewelry stall, perhaps, a bracelet that has long ago ripped.
Rin recalls vaguely a strange event involving a pearl necklace, during one of the two annual Sinegard summer festivals she had attended.
The night had begun to tighten its hold on the world as the parade of Nikan's noble families came to an end, just a little later than the other parade Rin had seen in the year prior.
She had waited for Kitay to find her again as she inspected a jewelry booth. As a future soldier, she held no intention of buying anything there, but an unwelcome face had gone to bother her over it anyway.
When a beautiful prince climbs out of his palanquin and approaches to insult the pearl necklace she admires alone, she is, shamefully, ensnared. Entrancing, the way the shadows cast on his face dance against the light of the lantern. She only manages to return his insult half-heartedly, and he leaves with a roll of his eyes.
Rin frowns down at the pearl and reaches out with a booted foot to kick it back into the shadows, out of the sun's reach. She doesn't like how a single pearl managed to dig up such an event in her mind's eye. But more details, unworthy continuations of past events resurface again.
Her best friend hands her a blue-and-silver wrapped present a week after the festival, with a knowing grin she can't fathom. She doesn't presume to know the mind of a genius, but indeed a strange coincidence it is that he thought to pick these very pearls for her.
Rin still doesn't understand what that look in Kitay's eyes had been when he'd handed her the box. She wagers it's simply pride that he somehow managed to garner exactly what she had wanted.
She grows uninterested in that subject quickly, leaving the thought there to grow stale again. She lost the necklace by the time she joined the Cike, and she did like it but she never wore it anyway.
Rin tugs her mind from the thought and draws it back to foggy quietness as she shuffles along.
She has gone through the marketplace instead of the meatpacking district this time, and so now, it takes her only a few more minutes to reach Sinegard's East Gate.
She inhales deeply, peering up at the broken gate with weary eyes.
The word on the gate is still emblazoned there, same as when she entered the city. Of course it is.
Eternal.
Rin scoffs slightly at the word and spares only the slightest glance over her shoulder to Sinegard, to that city that shaped her and so many in her life.
Her voice is barely audible when she sends a cutting whisper over her shoulder, a final acknowledgement, as she leaves the silent city behind.
"Fuck you, Sinegard."
—
" The car's in reverse, I'm grippin' the wheel
I'm back between villages and everything's still "