Before I RIP [ Social | Private ]

All men wanted at the edge of their death was someone to comfort them as they passed into that cold, distant dream.  Ren had the ability to ease their suffering — both a gift and a curse bestowed upon her. With it, the princess had appointed herself a deathbed companion for those who required it and in the dead of night, she would answer their call.

She knew their death would come in her arms even before she saw their faces.

When the Magi had arrived at the hospital, it had been filled with patients. As they called to her, she came to them. One after the other until the floor was coated in a layer of fine ash. Now, there remained but a few left save for herself.

Stained rukh flitter in the air, some perched upon the walls. Her eyes shut and she lets out a softened breath as she slips a worn ring around her finger. Just as she had thought she was safe to leave, the door opens. Ren turns her head to look, her brows knit.

“What brings you here?”

In his arms was but a child. The thickness of her blood staining her clothes, her chest rising just a breadth shy of death. At the sight of it, she felt the warmth she had left leave her skin. An injury such as that was no accident. Such a young life that to fathom who inflict such a lethal wound upon her made her skin crawl.

Ren rises from her position, as if to make her way towards them, but she stops herself. Any concern she had shown is zipped back into herself as her eyes narrow.

“If you wish for her to live, I am unable to help you.”

She existed as a harbinger for death — a shepherd of dying souls. There was a time she had done all she could to save those she could. She poured her magic into that dream until crimson tears fell from her cheeks. Even the will of Solomon could not answer her prayer.

“I am no healer,” she states, forcing her eyes away from them. Her thumb runs over her dampened palm. “And you will not find one here.”

The man did not react how she thought he would — far from it.

In his possession, he held a familiar crystal yet its essence was stained in black, of a god that had been long forgotten by man.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice strained back her disconcert of the matter of tainting an innocent child with such an object. She rises up to step forward a second too late. The darkness had taken hold of the child. A swath of black rukh herded around her, funneling into her wound.

Then, he had the gall to ask for conventional aid.

“You,” she hissed. But even she knew the deed had been done much before the words left her mouth. “Do you know what you’ve done to this child?”

The expression that soured her face was just as vehement as her words.  Before he had subjected the child to the influence of otherworldly magic, simple medical aid would have sufficed with guidance she would have offered. As much as she pressed her will against that of Solomon, this was foolish.

A frustrated breath blew out of her mouth and she pointed to a station with medical supplies organized neat within its cabinets and shelves.

“There,” she scolds, “Yet I doubt this poor child will need much care after what you have done.”

Unseen by either Magi nor the slaver, a change had begun to occur within Manaka. Her bleeding would remain to persist and the flesh around her wound would remain broken. A stolen relic had been clasped within her hand, a small trinket of power even she would not have known, now embedded into her flesh.

Hyperion would feel her skin grow cold and pale. Throat gasping for air, drool beginning to trickle from the sides of her gaping mouth. Something was wrong. Ren could see how the rukh moved around her. But she would speak not a word of it. For this was his consequence to bear.