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The fire should anger her more, even if it does not surprise her.
She had seen Jeralt’s face when she first forced the babe upon him; the horror as he looked her in the eyes and followed her final order all the same (“take it”).
She hadn’t told him to leave, but he had all the same. Jeralt had made his choice that night, and Rhea, turning back to cradle Sitri in her arms, had made hers.
-
They tell her that the funeral preparations can be made without her, if that is what she wishes. Rhea says nothing. Tells them she is the archbishop and that she will oversee things as she always has. No one contradicts her.
All of the monastery agrees that one tragedy has seemed to follow another with Sitri succumbing to her frailty and now her husband nowhere to be seen. They really had thought of Jeralt as one of them, after all – but those raised outside the church, well, what can you do?
Rhea wants to force them all to stop talking. Stop talking as if they ever knew anything of Sitri. As if they have the right to mourn a soul such as hers.
She purchases a casket, instead;inlaid with smaller, but no less resplendent gold pleated crests of Seiros on each of its four corners. Rhea has prepared the body for this, repaired the damage again and again just for this moment where she can send Sitri onward into the tapestry of time.
(Most of the other vessels she had burned under the stars. Each had a shining light named after them now).
She carries her to the Holy Tomb herself, ready to call upon one of her knights to carry the casket out when she is finished but Sitri swaddled against her chest fails to leave her arms
“You cannot,” Rhea pleads before the ghosts of the ten elites and her hundreds of siblings, “you cannot go now. Do not leave me here alone, please!”
(The Church of Seiros says that everything – plant, human, animal has a soul but Rhea has never seen one. This does not mean she does not believe.)
She decides then that she will not send Sitri off into the stars, or lay her here with so many who died in torment; neither will she give Sitri to the ground as if she were just another thing to be broken down by the ravages of age. Rhea will see her perfect, and whole.
The casket goes into the ground a day later but Sitri stays in Abyss.
-
There were plants that only ever grew in the dark of Abyss – weeds, really, that neither Rhea or Seteth could stop from growing in the cracks of the shadow library but Sitri, enchanted by the faint light they gave off, had loved.
She had loved so much.
Rhea magicks her a field of pampas grass to lay in, grown from the Immaculate One’s blood; it is simple enough to restrain the growth of the field to a single chamber in the underground for unlike the weeds Sitri so loved the grass does not take to the damp and the dark.
It is simple too to place a piece of her own crest stone within the empty cavity of Sitri’s chest; as Rhea has done it many times before (some children of man did not take to her Nabatean blood and so in order to promote the healing of their bodies she had needed to give them something which the Seiros crest could respond to).
She’s done it so many times now, dug her claws into her own heart just to chip away at it for flakes she thinks she could do it in her sleep.
For Sitri she does more. Bringing her regular infusions of blood alongside offerings of freshly plucked lilies and valerian blooms, she arranges them neatly around the palate where she lays and she speaks with her.
She talks to her of how work has piled up again, and what she would not give to have Seteth help her with redoing the library (“you never met, but I think you would have gotten along well”). She tells her with a smile when Seteth returns alongside his sister, and admits with a frown she is not sure how long this time they will stay.
One evening she walks down from her chambers to Sitri’s place in abyss and informs her that the winds of fate have seen fit to bring her children back to Garreg Mach.
“We have needed a military arts professor,” Rhea admits, with some embarrassment, “and Jeralt never could take to that kind of instruction, you know.”
Rhea pauses and admits: “they’ve taken to it very well, though; and the bonds forged with the students, well, it makes me wonder…”
Rhea does not continues the train of thought, merely puts a hand to Sitri’s face and brushes a strand of hair from her eyes.
“That kindness… I am sure it can only come from you.”