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For a long time, the only thing she could remember was the freezing cold of the room.
How she had felt chilled to her very core, her heart and mind numbing until she was nothing but an ancient glacier against that table, existing but not alive at all. Taking the blows from nature unfeelingly, unseeingly; unable to neither decline nor consent to the hand that was dealt to her, to the hands that were touching her, holding her, marring her.
Then came glimpses of blue light hurrying across the ceiling.
The same glacial blue she felt inside as she lay frozen, tracking the darting of the light as it bounced from beam to beam, illuminating the dark corners all around her before again jumping towards the center of the room.
After that, her ears started working again.
And instead of that incessant, echoing ringing – as if she was stuck inside the vibrations made from banging on temple bells – she heard the crash and whine of metal against metal, and the desperate, panicked screams of men being torn apart by a snarling beast. Somehow she welcomed that sound more than the last one, almost felt grounded in it as she waited for the beast to tear into her as well.
When the room finally quieted, and all she could hear was its panting breaths as it undoubtedly took in its own carnage, she felt ready to greet Death like a friend. A tear slipped silently from her eye and down her temple as the beast’s slow steps towards her became a countdown until she could see her mother and sister again, and her trembling lips almost quivered into a bittersweet smile at the thought.
But then his face came into view, and she wondered if it wasn’t his icy rage that had cooled the room down. His eyes were dark with the promise of pain, his full mouth twisted into a bloodthirsty sneer, and she marveled at how his breath fogged out black in front of him, snaking and twirling around him like an aura of darkness.
Just as she was ready to meet her end at the hands of this beautiful harbinger of Death, this warrior angel ascended from the deepest pits of Hell, all malice melted away from his face. Heartbreak and fear contorted his lovely features as he gazed down at her, whispering, “You’re safe now,” and somehow, despite everything, she knew she could believe him.
She couldn’t remember if she had cried or thanked him, or if she reacted at all. He had swaddled her in his cloak like she was a lost child, arms trembling while he held her close to his chest, and she could both hear and feel his heart beating wildly underneath black leathers as he walked them out of there, urging her to only look at him and not the temple grounds around them.
And so she did.
She stared and stared, letting that angelic face spattered with the blood of those that hurt her fill her vision and her soul and her world until there was nothing else. She could feel him as she breathed in, collecting in her lungs, coloring her ribs and her blood a shimmering glacial blue, forever staining her in his color, marking her as inherently his.
Still, she stared.
One of the secrets of existence was revealed to her that night. She marked his likeness on the inside of her eyelids, so that when she finally closed them, his face was standing as clearly before her as if she was staring still.
But when she awoke the next morning, her body feeling sore and her mind broken, the sheets of the foreign bed scratching at her skin, the smell of the alien room burning through her nostrils, not a single familiar face in sight, she found that her memories had blended into a soup of excruciating pain and fear. Nausea filled her whole being, and she felt bile rising in her chest as her brain involuntarily and rapidly sifted through the murky images and sounds and smells, and when she could no longer keep it down she whirled over the side of her bed and puked her guts out, while gentle female hands she didn’t know held her hair back and stroked her clammy neck.
Over and over again, after the days had bled into each other until she could no longer take it – still retching to the memory of her sister’s dead, unseeing eyes; the thud of her decapitated head as it hit the stone floor; the cut strands of her onyx hair following slowly like smoke through water; the warm smell of iron making her gag all over – then Gwyneth Berdara decided to put a lid on it all. As she leaned back and once more wiped at her mouth and her stinging eyes with the back of a pale, freckled hand, shaking all over like a crisp autumn leaf braving the wind, she shoved down all her thoughts and memories from that night, vowing to never look at them again.
And she very nearly kept that promise.
Hiding away in her underground library, doing her daily chores of moving manuscripts and helping the other priestesses, her will of steel keeping those shameful memories neatly stored away like dusty old books on a forgotten shelf, she had found herself immune to the passing of time.
Donning a mask of carefree, casual contentment, avoiding any deep attachments or introspection, she worked herself numb, quietly existing as hers and her sister’s last breaths grew further apart, refusing to count the days that had slipped through her fingers.
Then a stern yet friendly face – with an icy heart and stubbornness so like her own – came into her life and set in motion actions that whirled away the dust and forced her to consider the memories written into those hidden corners. And finally she felt safe enough to let herself thaw, to move her body in a way that made her appreciate it, relish in its strength and what it could do, what she could do to others should they ever decide to put their hands on her again. She learned how to hone her body like a weapon against injustice.
And who else to teach her these things but her cruel savior from that dark night?
When she saw him again the sun was shining.
As the light shone brightly on his beautiful face, some of the rays also reached into her mind, illuminating truths she had hoped were forgotten. There were her sister’s last moments; there were the tears she shed as her body was taken from her; there were the vicious laughs of the men watching her being violated. She nearly fell through the cracks as the glacier fractured and shattered, the pain nearing all-consuming as she was faced with these things long suppressed.
But astonishingly, among those dark hurts she had kept buried under ice, there was a small blue light keeping her from falling together completely. And as she examined it closer, turning it over in her mind’s eye, the light grew, warming her from within and reminding her of how it had stained her very essence with a shining glacial blue that time her angel of Death had held her in his arms.
Looking into his kind eyes once more, the sun reflecting in golds and greens and browns, a forgotten piece of the puzzle finally slotted into place. Trembling not only with exertion, she took a deep breath, inhaling cedar and night-chilled mist. It pooled low in her chest, somehow part of that deep blue she had forgotten was already at home there, whispering about neglected promises as shadows lifted from her mind.
And as her savior gave her a smile that threatened to swallow her whole, Gwyneth Berdara felt something she had never felt before. In her chest, colored and scented as belonging to him, she felt a thread knitting itself together, binding itself irrevocably to her ribs.
Then she felt a tug.