Chapter Text
The clanging of metal alerts the locals quickly, causing them to flood out of their homes and out into the night air in an unstoppable, pushing crowd, even with Roland’s attempts at keeping them at bay. He glances back at Angelica through the crowd advancing carefully on the fight in their fields, cutting down their cultivated harvests too early– She had loved this town. They both did.
“ Argalia!!!” a choked, feminine voice screams, cutting through the commotion. They won’t approach any further with how vicious the battle has become, but that won’t last– Especially not now. Roland abandons his post to run through the houses underneath the cover of darkness where townspeople have taken their torches to the noise. He knows exactly where this will go, just like it has before, and he needs to grab as many of their belongings as he can before they end up burning too.
“I just want you to understand,” Argalia yells back, his voice infinitely more controlled. “Why won’t you see the way I do, Angelica?”
They had just wanted to settle. More than anything, and after everything, all she wanted to do is find somewhere to stay. Angelica doesn’t know what she would have done, but she knows that Roland wanted to be a blacksmith one day, and they both knew for years that they had wanted a child. Rage and grief boils over in Angelica’s mind, being let out through another visceral scream, this time lacking even words and coordination. Argalia falls backwards and falters under the weight of her sword, but it’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough, not to bring her brother back, or to erase the still-burning scars on her once pregnant belly. It will never be enough. Not for Roland, not for her, and not for the baby they had lost. Angelica heaves, bringing her sword down again. She raises her sword high above her head, poised to strike her little brother down.
She just wants…
To rest.
The thought makes her choke up suddenly, and tears well in her eyes, stinging against the autumn. She just wants to rest. Why can’t she? Why isn’t she allowed to, after everything?
Tears blur her vision, and he takes her hesitation as an opportunity. He shoulders her, knocking the sword from her hands and making her topple. The precise cut he makes stings, of course, but even more painful is the knowledge of betrayal. Of knowing why he does it.
The crowd gasps. The cut through her nightgown curves around her side and exposes her back, leaving them to bear witness to the pulsating, growing spines beneath her skin, following the map of her spinal cord down to her tailbone. She digs her hands into the grass, unable to look up. No. Why now?
Why, when she had tried so hard?
“A monster!” one woman screams.
“They were right!” another shouts. “She’s cursed–”
“
It’s not what you think!”
Angelica screeches through her running tears, sharper and higher than it should be, as though her vocal chords are changing in her throat. How long has it been since she had let go like this?
“Do you see the truth now?” Argalia says calmly behind her, betrayed only by the sadness in his voice that only she would ever recognize. It’s only the two of them, drowned out to everything else by the screaming, panicking crowd of townspeople. “They will never accept us… And that fool you married deluded you into believing so.”
The feeling of skin hardening and cracking to form scales starts at her back and spreads like wildfire down her arms and legs, down her back and tailbone ro where muscle splits with a violet, bloody sound, leaving a tail to whip into the air violently. Fingers now becoming claws dig into the ground beneath her, blurred completely by her tears. Is this truly how it must go?
“I just want you to be yourself,” Argalia says softly. Angelica feels his gloved hand hover over the spines on her back and the cut wrapping around her side, and she just barely holds herself back from attacking, from sinking her sharpened teeth into his neck– She refuses to give him the satisfaction of giving him what he wants; for her to cave in to her beastly desires and rend flesh to the end of the world. “Not someone who’s forced to suppress who you truly are.”
Angelica heaves, sobbing. Everything hurts like she’s on fire. The townspeople are approaching.
“If we die, we die together,” Argalia finishes solemnly. No, she doesn’t want to die here. She wants to live. She wants to rest, in a little home with her husband and their child, where nothing will harm them ever again. She wants to spend time with him, to see the sun light up his face in the evening as it sets. She wants to be a person, not an animal.
“Do you understand me yet, Angelica? Tell me, please…” he begs, “Have you heard her?”
…What?
He pulls her to her feet and into his arms, backing up a few steps from the shouting crowd, growing in their ravenous bloodlust. Argalia buries his head in her neck. It’s like they are children again, trapped in a dungeon with only each other. “I had to lose everything to hear her voice. I want you by my side, my sister. Please… Listen, and tell me you hear her.” His voice has turned weak and feeble; a little brother clinging to his sister in a desperate attempt to get the pain to stop by any means necessary. “She saved me, so I can save you too. Angelica…”
“ Coming through!” a voice shouts, slicing right through the crowd, cadenced by– hooves?
Argalia’s head snaps up and away from her shoulder. “...
You–”
He hisses, but is cut off by the quickly approaching barrage of noise as people scream and scatter in an attempt to not get hit. Roland never once stops moving; he grabs Angelica’s arm and yanks her free from the grip of her brother in one strong pull, and tosses her back into the wagon he’s sitting atop of. She lands roughly and with a distorted cry, hissing and curling in on herself as she lands on top of packed bags, but Roland focuses, rearing the horses to make them turn. He jabs his boot into one of the horses’ sides, snaps the rein, and crashes straight through hell– all to get her out. Angelica is torn by pain, grief, sadness, anger, a bone-deep tiredness and things she can’t even name, but it makes her cry harder into one of the bags she’s laying atop of as Roland crashes straight through the crowd. Despite it all, he came
back.
It makes her deep-set, newly renewed monster instincts almost purr at the back of her brain.
She hears Argalia scream something, but it’s drowned out easily by the speed they’re gaining on the crowd.
“We’ll be out soon,” Roland whispers, looking back at her for a moment before snapping the reins once again, forcing the horses to speed up once more. “Just rest, okay?”
His voice is soft. Loving. He’s concerned. He’s never, not once, seen her as a monster.
As they leave their life behind them once more, carrying only what they can take in one cart, Angelica sobs into the cold, open air that whips past in the night. They run once more, just as they always have.