Lament of the Traitor King (Complete)

Chapter 95 - The Fall of the Poison House

Ophelia brought the blanket closer around her, huddled closer to the fire. She didn't know whether she was more discomforted by the burning of the fire and the numerous memories it engendered in her, or the desolate, forbidding weight of the sheer, flat nothing that seemed to surround them.

She felt vulnerable here, knew without a question that she would not catch a grain of sleep in the snow-covered desert she huddled on.

The sound of Winnie's voice made Ophelia jump after the half hour they had spent in mutual, surely horrified, silence. "I've been trying to think of what to say. Goddess, but what is there to say?"

Ophelia slammed her eyes shut, felt her mouth as it seemed set on pulling her lips into its vortex. Finally, she said, "How could any of this be possible?"

Winnie was sat, not quite next to her, a few feet away from Ophelia. The older Witch looked as though she were deep in thought - or shock - her chin rested on her arm, her knees drawn to her chest. Her eyes, whose color and energy reminded Ophelia once of the bright surface of river water in the summer time, now seemed cold, stonier.

The Witch dragged a hand through her filthy hair - a trait Ophelia shared, now - and said, "Why, don't you know, anything's possible, with Magic."

Ophelia brought her arms tight around herself. "Then fuck it." As soon as the words left her mouth, Ophelia began to weep. She clenched her fingers to her eyes in a futile attempt to stop the tears from flowing. She shook with emotion. Anger, fear, sorrow, despair-

The feel, of Winnie drawing Ophelia close to her, brought a relief that could not hope to stop the pain she felt, but was a welcome surprise. For a moment, Ophelia thought that she could almost recall what it felt like to drink cocoa on a winter night like this, safe in the belief that nothing could ever harm the gentle women who called her their Sister.

Ophelia ducked her head into the crook of Winnie's arm, sobbed openly, muffled against the fabric that was rapidly warmed with her shaking breaths. She did not know how long they spent like that, but in her mind she recalled memories that would never leave her, would infest her nightmares.

Two robed figures, trying to beseech a God they thought they could assuage, once they realized they had no control over it. Ophelia could recall the terrible quality their faces possessed as they begged for their lives to the creature on the altar. 

In memory, their faces most reminded her of a horrible, vivid painting she had once seen, depicting sinners at the mercy of a Judeo-Christian demon. Those people in the painting had seemed to have been rendered genderless as they shared the experience of terror, eyes bulging, pale hands raised in a universal gesture of helpless groveling.

Winnie spoke, breaking the pull that terrible, oh so recent memories called to Ophelia. "We survived."

That they did. Again, Ophelia was compelled to remember the flight of the two robes figures, then the second who died in that room. Hera had taken hold of her eldest daughter's shoulder, then seemed to pull her in for a shockingly intimate embrace.

Hera had told her that she was vampiric, and it was not until that moment that it had truly sunk in for her.

It almost seemed as though Hera had pulled her eldest daughter to her in for a last kiss, and Sia began to jerk, spasming. Then came her screams, which echoed louder still, it seemed in Ophelia's memory, than Netta's had. 

After she sent her already decaying eldest to the ground, Hera fled the room, her movements taking on a jerking, rapid motion that seemed to go well beyond what a physical form should have been capable of.