Chapter Text
Ash was lucky; she met her soulmate young. They were from the same clan, and their clan – and their queen – were particularly ruthless. Injuries were common, and so were their flowers. It didn’t take long to work it out.
Echo was patient with her. They spent their time running, laughing; they trained to get stronger together, but they also trained to spend time together. Ash was quick; she pushed Echo to run and jump and dodge faster, and for longer. When twigs pulled at Echo’s skin, carnations bloomed on Ash’s, and their matching reds bound them ever closer. Echo’s skill with a bow was almost supernatural, and Ash tried and tried to mimic her technique; she improved week by week and the bruise on her bow hand darkened; Echo’s own hand, despite no bruise of her own, bloomed with forget-me-nots.
They sparred, sometimes. Ash hated seeing the white lilies stark on her skin, marking the places where her headless spear had left welts on Echo, or where her dulled knife had left a shallow, painful graze. Echo hated hers more; she covered them, ashamed, and injured Ash as little as she could.
Sometimes, they’d forget to train at all, and they’d simply run through the forest until they flopped, and they’d talk and laugh until the sun started to set. Sometimes they would fight, but playfully, tackling one another and rolling over and over until they were an exhausted tangle of limbs and breathlessness.
It was times like these that Ash wondered whether they could run away. Leave Azgeda, and spend their lives together – without flowers, without injuries. Without training and spying and fighting.
Of course, they never got that far. They never got to be more than children together – and if she was honest with herself, this was what Ash had always feared. Echo never had the heart of a killer; but Ash was poison.
Ash knew what was going to happen when Echo loosed her arrow at the fleeing man, and she knew it would make no difference, for he would still die. She knew that Echo’s harsh whisper, telling her to fight, was a desperate plea – for Echo could not kill Ash. She would not lose her.
And Ash knew that her instinct to live was greater than her capacity to love, no matter what the flowers said. How else could she carry the white lilies, ashamed and yet accepting, while Echo did everything she could to avoid them? Ash was poison; Echo was innocence.
Ash felt her fingers close around the arrow shaft and knew it was fate. She knew what she had to do, and she did it mechanically, even as her eyes filled with tears and her heart twisted painfully. Echo – always the better fighter, always willing to believe the best of everyone – stared at her, eyes wide with shock and pain; the blood flowed over her bottom lip and dripped into Ash’s mouth. It tasted coppery – poisonous. Ash suddenly wished she’d had the chance to kiss her – just once, just to show her that she had wanted their future.
“Congratulations, Echo,” Queen Nia’s voice said. And Ash knew that she would never be allowed to forget what she had done; she would forever bear the name of the soulmate she killed. Being a spy, an assassin, would be easy now. If she could kill Echo, if she could live as Echo, she could kill anyone. The poison would spread.
Later, when she finally allowed herself to look at her chest, she expected to find the monochrome rose, wilted, that graced so many chests in Azgeda. Instead, she found her rose entwined with a dead lily. It marked her as her soulmate’s killer; it added to her shame, and made her poison visible.
The bitter tang of blood – of her soulmate’s blood – never quite went away.