In that moment, as her bare feet scraped against the wet ground, crushing all kinds of different things she wasn't prepared to think about, Aura felt as though an external force was controlling her body.
Her mind had separated, she was watching from a disembodied point of view. It was during this calm that her thoughts veered, and it dawned on her, not for the first time, that all the years Aura had spent in this world there was one recurring theme constantly badgering itself into the forefront of her mind lest she ever forget.
Any form of love is a weakness. Whether platonic or otherwise. To care enough about a comrade to disregard orders and risk your lives, to get lazy and content in someone's arms, to forget your primary focus because of one person— many have been punished for less.
There was a reason rules were set in place.
A very good damned reason.
Maybe if she had remembered this that thing wouldn't have been able to take advantage of her so easily. Yet here she was again, willing to let her emotions take the reins.
If Markus could see her now he'd have steam coming out of his ears.
A leader needs to know his soldiers are loyal to him, his cause and not each other. That they will listen and can be trusted not to veer off course. That they won't be overwhelmed by grief if another falls, sinking into a bottomless depression or turning into manic creatures without a sliver of sense.
Because that's the cost of love.
Nothing is free in this life.
The balance of the universe demands payment and boy did the alpha make a habit of drilling this into her head daily.
A boy will lose his pet. A crone will lose her husband. A daughter will lose her father. You can lose your mind.
She'd be lying if she said she didn't feel it slipping away bit by bit every day.
But right now, she was acutely aware of the fact that she couldn't deny that a part of her felt violated. She clung so helplessly to the hope that that was him when it wouldn't have even made sense. His captors wouldn't have allowed him to roam so freely. She abandoned all common sense and that creature took advantage of her for it.
It was almost torture at this point, dangling something she desperately wanted in her face like that, only for it to not be real.
Soulless white orbs flashed in her mind like an intrusive thought.
Her ears burned and her eyes stung with tears.
Markus would have wanted Aura to go straight to the merfolk. He wouldn't have wanted any detours. He wouldn't have allowed any.
If he knew she was risking her life like this...
... She didn't care.
Because passed the whispery strands of light that cut through the canopy and exposed moss and bark and green? All she could see were those fucking eyes.
The same eyes that watched her as they took her soulmate. The same eyes that revelled in the massacre of her family.
In that moment Aura was confronted with the fact that she had spent many years pushing the subject of what happened to her home, locked in a tight little room in her mind. She would watch the skies and dive into the ocean for darkness, she would burn through to her last sweat and tears during her training. Her mind was constantly occupied with the encyclopaedia's, the journals and history books Markus provided. Aura would never allow herself too much time too stop and let herself remember. Not the details.
It was traumatic. She was a child.
She allowed herself to acknowledge the widely known facts. But never the details. The experience. Being too naive to understand what was happening, but knowing that it was really bad.
The sudden reemergence of the villain of her life story forced it all back into her consciousness with the force of a falling boulder.
And it makes it all the more terrible now that she's old enough to understand.
Even now as she tore through the forest like a wraith, running faster than she ever thought possible, a wild array of emotion threatened to consume her. With her vision blurred, she raced through the undergrowth through splotches of green and blurred shadows. Her limbs threatened to fold in, her chest ached with a pain that cut so deep her insides felt hollow.
But it was the rage that pushed her onwards.
Sheer fury that pumped through her veins and clouded her mind. But it almost wasn't enough. The flashing started.
In her mind, she was living it all over again. She was that same little girl being told to run in the opposite direction, to save her own life in the guise of a game. She could hear the cries of her people, shrill and screeching, see the helpless run, the futile attempts to escape the vein covered monsters with angel blood dripping from their mouths. She remembered seeing a scholar claw at the ground as two vampire tore the wings from his back and severed his eyeballs. A simple local being eaten alive from her stomach upwards, paralysed, her intestines splayed on the ground. Warriors that dropped like flies, trying to develop a border by the gates and failing. The shattered instruments broken and battered on the street of souls, dying trees and violet fields swarming with silver blood.
Those soulless eyes that chased after her in pursuit.
Her father attempting to protect her from it all, tried to keep her eyes covered as he flew her away from the carnage that would become of her estate. But she was a child that had never heard screaming like that before. She had taken a peak.
She had opened her eyes and taken a peak at the massacre. The peak turned to a bulging gaze that couldn't look away, couldn't process it. She didn't know why a four winged angel fell from the skies with his jaw unhinged. She didn't understand why there was so much blood, who these new people were, why she even had to leave. All her life up to that point she had known nothing but peace, chaos wasn't something she was familiar with.
But now? It had met her at every corner, greeting her like an old friend.
She knew exactly what was going on.
The realisation triggered an oncoming panic attack. She kept seeing the blood.
Aura had to come to a stop because she couldn't breathe.
She doubled over by the nearest tree, uncaring of her vulnerability as her palms dug into her knees. The angel tried to swallow deep breathes, her curls falling in front of her to curtain her face. Her pulse rate was increasing, she dug a shaky fist into her chest.
Amos would have known what to do. She thought desperately, tempted to claw through her chest.
That was when she felt her skull split.
"Pretty reds and pretty greens." His gentle voice uttered. Grey eyes closed as he embraced the little girl tightly, swallowing her sorrow so that she wouldn't have to bear all of it.
Every year on her birthday, Aura would run off to and enormous bonsai tree by a river near her home. It had a trunk the colour of silver, with white leaves reaching for the clouds in the skies. It was perched on a little rise on a cliffs edge that overlooked a forest full of magnificent creatures.
Compared to the rest of the world, she felt tiny.
The curly haired boy beside her had lights flowing from his palms, the colour of red and green. He did it for her because she liked the idea of Christmas in the Adam world. They glittered like specks of shiny dust that stayed clustered together, and danced around the tree the way she imagined little fairies would in the fae realm.
There was a dead body lying under the bonsai, staining the silver coloured grass with red. It wasn't an angel.
The little boy didn't let her focus on the body, he angled her so that she would watch the lights.
"Never forget, hakkee." His tongue flicked against the word, a thick accent curling around the syllables. "One day you will remember me, and together, we will strip our enemies bare of all that they had stripped of us. We will wreck a havoc unlike any they had ever seen before, and we will carve our names so deeply into the fear of their hearts that in a million years they will still remember us."
The little girls hands clutched tightly onto the boys neck, her face burying into his chest.
"Pretty reds and pretty greens." She whispered.
Aura felt a cold pressure on the left side of her skull, like a thumb was sliding across her skull to her forehead. It was soothing against the heat of her throbbing head. It calmed her almost instantly. The tears stopped.
She stood straight again, felt her focus sharpen like a honed predator. She put one shaky foot in front of the other until control over her body was completely her own.
She paused for one second more, just to take a deep breath.
As soon as she caught the direction of the tracks once more, she ripped through the ground so fast she left a cloud of dust.
Amos opened a grey eye to see Mammon playing with his daggers. From a quick observation they had stopped again, but they were somewhere else. The trees weren't the same, the air was more humid here.
He spared a second to wonder how far they had travelled from the compound, about to open his mouth to say something snarky when he felt a dull pain at the back of his head.
He hadn't eaten in so long he was starting to feel his injuries, they weren't healing as fast as they normally do. Ideally he shouldn't even wake up with a throbbing head at all.
Unless it was the good kind.
Amos eyed Mammon like a hungry snake, wondering how long he would keep his stomach sated. Would he have to cut him into pieces? Or could he gulp him down. He would be tough meat for sure... but he wasn't in the mood for a fatty meal anyway. He needed tendons and entrails and blood in his mouth. He needed to get his strength back up.
He hadn't figured out how he would do it yet. Not with three witches binding him with magic. All he knew was he had a three course meal in one, just an arms reach away. One that wasn't paying attention to him....... And three witches settling to go to sleep.
Even the wicked need to rest.
He smirked, finding it ironic.
But that was when he felt it.
It started off as a cool sensation, like a drop of water given to a starched throat. It spread across his being with a familiarity that he hadn't realised had been there. Honey and milk, although so faint he barely picked it up, it still overwhelmed his senses. The smirk grew into a maddeningly wicked grin.
He stayed silent, ready to watch the oncoming scene unfold.
The girl was as silent as air you couldn't rely on your senses to hear her. All those years of training really paid off.
But even Amos wasn't prepared for what came next.
First her scent disappeared.
There was an ominous quiet that even the demon seemed to sense because he stopped spinning his knives in the air. Those creepy white orbs flickered across the trees warily.
Amos watched a spider reach for the end of Mammon's long hair, wondering if it was poisonous.
It wouldn't affect the demon regardless.
Deciding that it must've been a trick of the wind, Mammon grunted a deep exhale, irritated and disgruntled as he continued to play with his throwing knives.
There were four.
One after the other, he would throw them up by their bound handles and catch them with two hands like a circus performer. He tossed them high into the air, watching the curve of the obsidian daggers spin above him.
By the next throw, a knife disappeared.
The binds holding Amos together, also disappeared.
Mammon stiffened.
"He drichi." Aura whispered.
'Hello again'.