Chapter Text
★ 𝘪 𝘣𝘦𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘰𝘨𝘴 — 𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘴𝘬𝘪
Lenore’s first memory was of drowning.
Her mother’s hand forcing her head beneath the water, lungs burning as her little body thrashed desperately for a breath, choking on the water. She remembered she tried to breath back then, but it only clouded her nostrils flood with water more, the back of her throat tasting like iron and rot. The harder she fought against i, the heavier the weight in the back of her head became, pressing her down almost with the same desperation she was trying with to break free until her thoughts blurred and her vision started to turn black. Then silence.
Sometimes she misses that silence.
Then air. Hands grasping onto her arms, dragging her upwards with the same desperation she and her mother had fought with against each other, the water’s grip becoming weak around her until it let go. Her twin’s arms surrounded her like a warm blanket as the water escaped her lips, puking it until the sounds of her gags turned into sobs. Her head was pounding back then, even hearing was difficult, but she remembers she could hear her brother’s voice breaking as she fought against their own mother, begging her to let Lenore live. Ten years old. Too young to understand the motives of her mother’s actions. She’s still too young to do it after seven years.
The cause of that fight it’s something she have forgotten with the time, just like the cause of the countless conflicts afterwards between them. And before that one. It could be because River had tripped that day and bloodied her knees, the blame landing on her shoulders just like always happened when River had a misfortune, like just her presence was something rotten and created doomed situations. It could be her mother’s sickness running deeper that day, sickness that reaped into a rage onto her child. Her, always her, never on River. Or maybe it was simply the weight of shame—shame of birthing a cursed child, a girl who should never have drawn breath. It wasn’t the first time her mother tried to took that breath from her. It won’t be the last, neither.
The reason for her mother’s violence has long since dissolved into the past, long since it turned into an echo and just the actions of her hands remained eared into her mind and her skin. It’s been long since she tried to find a justification to excuse the woman who gave her birth. All that remains is what happened.
Lenore doesn’t know why it’s that the memory that surfaces now as she sits watching the Martyr’s Gate, perched in the window of the near ruined building, a strange place with multiples chairs and tables. She doesn’t know what was that place made for, but she doesn’t looses sleep thinking about it neither. The Old World is something that it’s better to have multiple arms length away.
One hand rests on the knife at her side while the other carves absently into a scrap of wood. Just a few feet away, River kneels as he prays, lips moving with words of hope— perhaps of prosperity, though such things feel like lifetimes away from the reality of the world.
Lenore can’t join him on his prayers even if she wish she could. She never can be next to him in these moments, much less there. The Gate is sacred ground, too pure for a girl whose very birth was branded a sin.
No— a sinner like her just have two things to do: to shield the truly faithful and to guard the next Prophet, River. Her twin brother.
From the very moment of their birth their paths had been divided. River, firstborn, was marked for greatness. When he was born it had been the first day of sun after weeks of rain, the world welcoming him with love.
Thirty minutes later, without further notice, instead of the placenta her mother was giving birth to a second child. Lenore. Unwanted. Their mother tried to end her life there on the spot for the first time before the warning reached the Elders— too late. They already arrived to welcome the future Prophet. Not her. River. And as her sister, her fate was sealed then. With her first cry the rain started to pour back.
If River’s destiny was light, hers was shadow. Where he was chosen to lead, she was chosen to bleed. There was only one future the Elders allowed her: war and death.
Sometimes, Lenore can't help but be obercome by the selfish thought that if she had been born thirty minutes before River her situation would be much different. Vain thoughts, she reminds herself, and there's no place for vanity in this world. The Prophet has plans for each of her children, and this was the hers.
“Lenore.”
Her brother’s voice pulls her back, shattering the silence. The sudden break of it makes her hand slip, the knife’s edge sliding into skin instead of wood. A thin line of red opens across her palm, instantly running down the cracks of it, crimson staining everything in its path. River gasps, already reaching, his hands closing over hers with practiced urgency, accustomed to her sister’s wounds but even then worried about them.
Lenore barely reacts at the knowing feeling. Pain is an old companion, dulled by the years and layered scars. Especially in her hands, where feeling has long since disappeared, nerves fried after too many wounds.
“I’m fine,” she murmurs, voice barely above a whisper. It never is— always quiet, always beneath the rest.The very fact that she speaks would be surprising if it weren't for the fact that she only speaks to her brother. “Just a small cut.”
“Even so,” River says softly, his voice steady, his hands already searching through his backpack for bandages and a vial of alcohol. “You need to be more careful, Re.”
Lenore only nods, wordless, and extends her hand toward him. While he works, her gaze drifts past him, sweeping the street with the same sharp vigilance that has kept her alive this long. Usually she belonged to the front lines against the Wolves; now, her duty is another one that she’s used to, but heavier nonetheless— ensuring River reaches the end of his pilgrimage unharmed.
She doesn’t flinch as River presses the soaked cloth to her wound, the alcohol mixing with the crimson and running through the cracks of her hand along it. The sting roots her to the moment, grounding her. Pain is familiar, almost a welcome feeling at this point; a sensation she has long grown used to, sometimes even sought out, only to remind herself she can still feel at all. It’s more than once that she scares herself thinking that she doesn’t feel at all, that she is the monster they’re turning her to be. Pain reminds her that she’s not. She’s alive. She feels.
Her eyes never leave the same spot across the way: the shadowed corridor where Wolves most often slip to reach the Martyr’s Gate and destroy the prayers of hundreds of faithfuls. More than once she reached there to watch the spot and had to kill a Wolf for trying to destroy the Sanctuary inside of the automobile.
The corridor is lined with ruined stores. Lenore avoids the Old World ruins whenever she can. It isn’t just the fact that they’re places nested with sin— it’s the way the walls press in, the ceilings too low, the air too stale. She’s built for open sky and cold rain. Put her under a roof, and every nerve in her body whispers that she isn’t safe. She had to enter this ones, thought, to make sure the perimeter is clear for demons to keep her brother safe. Her comfort it’s secondary when her brother’s safety it’s at risk.
“I’m talking to you,” River murmurs, not scolding, just trying to pull her back from her mind as he wraps the bandage around her hand, slowly.
Her eyes refocus on him, dragging themselves away from the shadows across the street. “Sorry,” she says softly. “What were you saying, Ri?”
“Your prayers.” His head tilts, hopeful. “Did you write them? I can leave the note inside for you.”
Lenore shakes her head. “You know I’m not allowed.”
“You’re not allowed in,” River corrects gently, “but I can still carry it for you.”
Her lips press into a thin line. “That’s not how it works. There’s no point of leaving a prayer if you cannot do it yourself.”
He hesitates. “It would still be something.”
“I haven’t written anything,” she cuts him off, her tone flat. “Leave it.”
The conversation dies there. Her brother is just trying to be kind and help her, she knows this, but she can't help but feel frustrated with his actions. If they get caught, as always happens, the blame would fall completely over her and she will be punished while he is left alone. Lenore doesn’t mean to sound so harsh, but she’s tired. Tired of him trying to make space for her in a world that carved her out of it from birth. Tired of him trying to make her settle between people that hate her from birth.
She doesn’t meet River’s eyes after she shuts him down— can’t do it without feeling bad for her twin brother, her own harsh words replaying in her mind. She’s been trained to protect him, like a guardian dog, and like the dog she is each time she turns against her owner she finds herself whining from guilt. So she remains quiet and staring down at her feet, leaning against the window frame as she keeps sitting there. Her hand is still throbbing in time with her heartbeat, the smell of alcohol filling her nostrils and making her head pound.
River doesn’t press, he never does when her mood sours and that just makes her feel worse. Feel like the demon they say she is. His poor brother, the epitome of pureness, being dragged down by someone cursed like she is. And even then he finds the force to give her space, to be nice to her. She should be ashamed of it; she is. So ashamed of herself. But even then she remains quiet, avoiding his eyes as he just ties the rest of the bandage in silence and sits afterwards in front of her, folding his legs and exhaling like someone older than seventeen. His prayers were always long, and lately, they’ve been getting longer.
Lenore knows why. The Elders have started to speak to him about plans of succession. Not directly, not yet; but the signs are there, even she is not blind enough to not realize it. He’s allowed inside the sanctum at night. When he speaks during group prayer, even the older warriors bow their heads. And the Elders can’t wait to put their hands on him and control everybody from a new Prophet.
She should be proud of him.
Instead, she feels something brittle growing in her chest. Lately she finds herself harboring too much vain thoughts, thoughts that if anyone knew she has it would send her to her death. How she, destined to die, could yearn for the destiny of her brother? How could someone like her —the second child, the cursed one, the girl trained to be a blade— feel envy toward the sun?
Her eyes flicker up to observe her brother, still deep into his prayers, now far away from the sacred place. She knows he does this for her not to feel alone and it frustrates her as much as makes her love him more. His face is soft as he murmurs beneath his breath, lips barely making a move, face relaxed just like always has been— untouched by the violence she’s known. The curse skipped him and it’s her hands the ones stained with blood.
Even now she still remembers the taste of iron from her first kill. She was eleven; her body too small to wield the heavy axe they had give her, but she did anyways. Too slow to dodge the returning blow that split her brow open. She doesn’t remember anything from the fight but the outcome of it with the Wolf trespasser that tried to spy into Seraphite territory, a young scout barely older than her. Her axe met his head and the rest was story. The Elders called it a sign. That war followed her as naturally as breath followed birth, as blood pumps into veins.
And her brother, poor soul, cried for three days after what happened. It was her hands the one stained with blood, it was her the one that had her brow split open and a black bruise decorating her ribs. It was her the one with a hurt body and soul— and even when she was the one hurting she stayed by his side consoling him like he was the one that had wielded the axe. The one that gave the finish hit. The one that was wounded.
She curled beside him that night, bruised and bleeding, and held him as he sobbed for what her hands had done. For what she had become. She whispered that it was okay, that she was okay. That he didn’t need to be scared for her.
But she had lied.
She had been terrified.
Still is.
It was her the one that received the punishment from her mother’s hands because of River’s tears. She blamed Lenore because of them, just like she blamed on her the bad weather. In the failure of the crops that year.
She learned soon that the more she cried the more her mother found joy in landing hits. The less she cried, the more her mother grew bored of putting her hands on her, until soon she stopped when Lenore stopped crying completely. The last time she received a hit from her mother was the last time the woman looked at her too.
Was it twisted that she missed those hits? At least at that time her mother acknowledged her.
River is still praying when Lenore notices the blood on her palm has begun to dry, darkening into the cracks of her skin like it's always lived there, like it’s the place where belongs. Which is it. Hands forever stained with blood.
She stares at it, mind once more rambling. Always quiet, but her mind is not.
Blood is part of her. Woven into her skin, etched into her bones. No matter how hard she scrapes, it never leaves. It made her. Marked her. Claimed her. But near River, it feels wrong. Out of place. Like a sin too near to something sacred. Like even the scent of it might stain him.
Her hand moves, pressing onto her tunic perhaps too hard, not because it hurts but because the sight of it makes her feel repulsed.
“River.”
Lenore’s eyes are back on him. She sees it, how he doesn’t hear her at first, the quiet prayer still slipping through his lips. There’s something beautiful about it. Even Lenore, the sinner she is, can see it. The way he speaks like he believes, truly believes, that someone is listening to him it’s mesmerizing.
She tries again. This time louder.
“River.”
That it what makes his prayer halt mid sentence, eyes looking up and connecting with hers. The last light of dusk filters through the windows, catching on the soft skin on his face, unscarred, saintly.
She always thought her brother looked too soft for this world.
He rises slowly, hands brushing off dust from his robes and walking to her. His eyes flick to the bloody cloth on her hand, then back to her face.
“I didn’t clean it properly, i’m sorry” he says with his soft tone. “I’ll do it again.”
She lets him take her hand without putting much of a fight, just like before did. She doesn’t like the sight of his fingers stained with blood, but let him anyways because some twisted part of her feels like he is the only person in this world who can truly fix what is wrong with her. He’s the purest form of an human being and she is the most corrupted one.
His soft hands, lack of calluses from a life of pray and nothing more, undoes the bandages, breathing a small sight at what he finds. The harsh movement of cleaning the blood on her tunic just opened the wound more. There’s a frustration in that sigh; not with her, never with her, but at the wound itself.
“You don’t have to keep fixing me,” she murmurs, just like she always end up saying when he tries hard enough to help her.
“You don’t let anyone else.”
A silence lingers between them, thick and complicated. Lenore wants to counter his words, it’s not like anyone else tries to help her neither. The only times she heard someone else talk about her it was to spit her name like it was a curse. But she preferred it like that, discovered soon enough that she doesn’t need anyone else. Just him and her. Her and him.
“I just hate this place,” she says suddenly, gaze flicking toward the Martyr’s Gate. The most unholy words escape from her lips each time that they’re alone, it’s one of the powers that River has over her. She cannot lie to him. If there was anyone else here she would be hanged by now. “I hate the way it watches me. Like it knows I don’t belong.”
“You do belong.”
“No. You belong in this place, not me. You walk, people bow their heads. You pray, everyone listen. Me? They don’t even look at me unless they’re afraid I’ll draw a knife.”
“You saved lives with that knife,” River says, starting to wrap the fresh bandage, this time more careful with it. “You keep the Wolves from breaching the east perimeter. Elder Shema said it was a blessing—”
“Shema said it was a blessing from the Prophet to give the people a Demon like me against the battle with the Wolves,” Lenore cuts in, voice sharper than intended.
River flinches. Not visibly, but she sees it. In the way his hands pause. In the way his mouth opens like he wants to say something and thinks better of it. Both of them know she’s right. She does not belong there as much as he tries to make her fit.
She sighs. “I’m sorry.”
He finishes wrapping her hand and ties it, double knot before pressing gently against it.
“I know you’re tired,” he says.
Tired.
The word tired feels like an understatement about the feeling that’s been harboring through years in her bones. A heavy feeling that makes each day more difficult than the prior one. Sometimes it becomes difficult to get up from bed. Sometimes she just wants to disappear and don’t look back. She’s not just tired. She’s hollowed by the years of being something she never asked to be, a tool in a war. A prophecy no one explains.
Lenore doesn’t answer to his words because she doesn’t have anything to say. It is not his fault, never was. Each time she suffered he was the only one there for her, the only one that tried to heal her wounds, mental and physical ones. He’s the only one she can talk to, and she knows that even if she could talk to someone else it would never be like she talks with him. Two words and her throat would be cut open for being a heretic. She stands and walks around the automobile filled with prayers, always at a certain distance from it. Not too close.
River speaks behind her, softly. “There’s something I didn’t tell you.”
She turns, brows frowning. There was no secrets between them, and the fact that he didn’t tell her something, even if it’s just the littlest of things, unsettle her.
“I had a vision,” he says. “Two nights ago. During prayer.”
Her blood runs cold. Seraphites take visions seriously. Too seriously. People have died over less. And Lenore? She takes River’s visions more serious than anyone else.
“What kind of vision?” she asks, barely keeping her voice neutral. Trying to, at least.
Lenore can see the hesitation in River’s eyes, the way his lips part, then close, and part a second time, like he’s second thinking about saying it out loud.
“There was a river,” he says at last, finally, trying to maintain his voice low. Like the only ones who can hear the secret was him, her and the wind. “Dark. Wide. With no bottom. I stood at the edge, and you were already in it, waist-deep, your hair loosen and eyes on the sky as you walked forward, towards something i could not see. I called your name.”
“What happened?”
“You didn’t turn around. Not once.”
Silence stretches.
River continues, quieter: “The Elders would say the river is a path of blood. That you’re meant to walk it.”
Lenore scoffs. “Of course they would. It is probably that.”
“I’m not so sure,” River says. “The feeling I had… it wasn’t fear. It wasn’t peace either, but it felt… final. Like you were meant to go. Like you had to.”
Once more Lenore doesn’t know how to answer to her brother. She never had visions before. Never dreamed at all too much. Just the same moments on repeat, fragments of her life: her mother’s hands, cold rain, taste of iron.
“I don’t want you to drown,” River says, her voice teary.
Lenore looks back at him then, a soft sigh leaving her lips. No matter how many years passed he is still that teary kid that suffered each time she did. Her hand moves, grabbing the back of his head to push it towards hers, resting her forehead against his.
“I won’t,” she says. “Not if I know you’re still on the shore.”
He smiles, but it’s tired. She can see it— he is worn too. Worn thin by a responsibility too big for his shoulders. Seventeen and already being told he’s the future. Seventeen and already mourning a twin he knows he’s going to lose. They both know that’s the only future waiting for her.
She doesn’t sleep that night. It’s been a long time since she slept properly, but these days she seems even more restless. There’s something in the air, she feel it in her bones and she trusts her instinct as much as she trusts her brother. Something big is coming, she knows it, but she cannot put her finger on what that’s it.
They camp on the outskirts of the Martyr’s Gate inside of one of the collapsed buildings, a store filled with beautiful vases. They had to jump from one building to another but finally they reached the one that looked the safest. River tries to make her set up inside where is safe and warm, but she climbs the stairs until she finds an open spot where she can lay peacefully. There’s a corpse a few feet away from her, a skeleton already— Seraphite by their clothes, a letter on the table next to him as he sits. She doesn’t look at it. Doesn’t even acknowledge it. She sees bodies every days, one more wouldn’t make her blink. She drops the bedroll in the middle of the opening and lays there, staring at the open sky observing the stars. The others say the Prophet is up there, in the stars, in the winds, in the breath between heartbeats.
Lenore isn’t sure she believes it. Or maybe she does, and that’s the problem. Because if the Prophet really watches all, then the Prophet watched her be born— and still let her like an outcast.
✦ • ° *.
The Island greets them with the usual chill the next day. The path back to it was filled with silence between the siblings, not any problem, not any Wolves in it. Mist clings to the docks, curling along the water like smoke. River is the first to jump off the boat, the wooden planks creak under their weight as if protesting their presence. A few feet forwards there’s already people waiting— for him, always for him. He greets them with a smile and soft words, head bowing, and the followers bow back, his hands grasping onto his tunic, kissing his knuckles just like the simple touch would bless their lives. Lenore could understand them. River had that holy presence around him that makes you believe he could fix the rotten.
When Lenore steps behind him, following him, the air turns heavier, suffocating. Her boots doesn’t leave sound behind as she walks, like she is part of the shadows, but right now there’s no shadows where she can hide from their stares.
Their gazes slide over Lenore like she isn’t there. No— like she is. Like they can’t stand to look too long, afraid she might curse them by existing. Afraid that a simple glance at her would bring the curse upon their homes.
She’s used to it.
River slows his steps as though to wait for her but he’s met with denial, her head shaking in negation at his actions. She doesn’t need to say it out loud. They both need to go where they belonged; him to the Sanctum, her outside of Haven. She can see the hesitation in River’s eyes, steps faltering, but finally he steps forwards into the crowd, people surrounding him warmly.
Lenore takes the long way home. Boots hitting the boards of the dock until she meets dirt, passing along faces that harden the moment their eyes catch sight of her. A woman pulling water from a bucket jerks her child away when Lenore passes near, whispering words about the Prophet as if to wash the sight of her from the innocent child’s eyes. Then two boys, younger than her, by their lack of scars probably eleven, watch her with the same look she sees in every adult. Wary, disgust. They whisper words about a demon before running away.
She doesn’t react at their words, at their looks. Never does. But something inside her tightens. You would think that after so many years of living the same thing over and over again it makes it easier.
It doesn’t.
By the time she reaches the outskirts of the forest the sun it’s already hiding on the West. The east side is the most dangerous zone of the island, just right where the Wolves enter to spy and attack, and it’s where her cabin it’s located. She can hear the chants rise into the sky, voices waving prayers that she could never be part of. Excluded from. She tried to go once, just once when she was a kid. She was kicked out from there. Literally. She remembers what she saw before the soldiers beat her away from the Sanctum, River kneeled at the front, bathed in firefight. He belonged there. Shines in the light. It had been worthy just to see her brother that day.
The cabin is barely four walls and a roof patched together with rotting planks and rusted nails. It was that or sleep in the open forever. She liked it, but it was impractical when it rained or when it’s too cold, so she had to build herself a home. It’s been long since she put a step onto her parent’s and River’s home, unwelcomed there. It’s not like she wants to go back there, anyways. This part of the Island it’s empty, solitary, just like her and what she needed. The elders chose this place for her when she reached thirteen; close enough to the perimeter to serve as a watchpoint, far enough from Haven so no one would risk being near her. Like she was a rabid dog ready to strike the hand that feeds her. Maybe she is.
Lenore pushes the door open, the hinges whining in protest because of the movement, as rotten as the rest of the place. Inside it smells like mildew and smoke, a scent she grew accustomed to, one that feels like home, at least what she thinks home is. Setting her pack against one of the walls she doesn’t bother to light the lantern, letting the known darkness cover every inch of the room. It’s familiar; safer than a firelight that could give away someone is home. She sits in the edge of the cot, the frame groaning under her weight as she pulls her knife from her sheath. The blame gleams when a certain light from the husk seeps through the gasps of the boards.
Scarred fingers traces the edge. Never dull, since she was a kid she learn that her weapons must be always ready and her knifes sharp. She doesn’t pray, not out loud at least. The words of the Prophet doesn’t belong to her lips. She is no one to ask her for guidance, for light. But even if she knows she is no one to do it her mind betrays her. In the quite, she feels them echo in her chest, fractured, silent, unspoken.
May she guide me through the storm. May she keep me calm.
Outside, the chants grow louder, drifting through the forest like smoke from a fire. She recognizes them easily: evening prayers. Words she knows by heart but never dares speak aloud with the others, knowing that the moment she said them out loud she would be punished. Her lips move without sound, shaping the syllables alone in the dark, where no one can hears her.
Her mother’s voice creeps back then, unbidden—
A curse. That’s all you’ll ever be. A shadow over your brother’s light.
Lenore presses her knuckles against her thigh until it hurts, until the words scatter. She stares at her free hand then, the one that’s not grabbing the knife, the one that is against her thigh— the blood already seeping through the bandages River wrapped around her the day prior. She doesn’t unwrap them. She doesn’t change them for new ones. It will heal, like every each one of her scars did even if she didn’t patched them. Or it won’t. Either way, she doesn’t care.
The prayers continue, mixing with the forest whispers. Branches groaning in protests after the breeze hit them too hard, the sound of the rain starting to hit the dirt. Some drops of water starts to seep through the holes between the boards, but Lenore doesn’t even blink at that, used to it.
She lays back then, finally, after days of walking and alert to maintain her brother safe. She doesn’t relax there, never does, but at least she’s in a familiar place. A one well known. That brings her comfort, even when drops of water falls from the rotten ceiling and hits her head. Sleep won’t come even when she lays down and she’s exhausted to the bone. She asks herself when it’s the last time she got a proper sleep and finds that the answer is never. It’s more easy to ask when did she ever had a good sleep. Her body remembers too much for her own good, the memories embedded in her brain by fire. The sting of lashes cross her back, bone-deep cold rain soaked nights, the weight of her mother’s hands pressing her under water. Again, and again, and again. The same moments of her life in repeat without a second of rest of them. Every time she closes her eyes, the memories crowd out of the dark like maggots.
So she stays awake. At least she stays awake until her body finally gives out. Could be minutes, could be hours since then.
Her lips move at pair with the hundred voices raised in devotion, calling for the Prophet’s light until she falls asleep in silence.