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The silence is unnerving and unfamiliar, like your new tongue that does not carry words but only the sound of your plaintive whining through this space, empty save for a wrathful angel whose intentions are as cold as the blood you spilled to win her grievances. Your name is Jack Noir, the Sovereign Slayer, and you have done a terrible thing.
Terrible things, you correct yourself. You’ve done terrible things and you’re not sure whether fleeing, tail tucked, is or ever was an option. Oh, how your body cries to turn heel, flee with this lovely lady who’d sooner slit your throat than grant you even her begrudging comradeship. Flee with her through this broken, shattered glass and escape whatever illness this sick existence has planned for you. There was never any breaking Skaia’s chains, was there? The blood you spilled was but a farce, a game. You were never truly free, your victims bought you only the semblance of immortality. There is no freedom, only fate, and you are horribly, terribly, hopelessly bound.
The sound of pitiful cries escaping his throat draws your eyes from the destruction before you, miscolored blood oozing from the battered shapes of nightmarish embodiments whose breaths had caught and grown still. Fragments of nothing spilled out around them as if peeled from invisible walls. You had watched your friends fall before this black demon, you want to watch the black demon bleed in penance, but he now stood in fear of what neither of you knew. You were a simple Parcel Mistress, the Prospitian Monarch, and all you know is something is completely, irrevocably, sickeningly wrong.
He is watching you, his bold white eyes standing out against the blackness. Were his eyes always so bold, or were they emboldened by fear? More fear than that which rolled off him in nervous waves? You watch him intently for a moment, sword arm limp and unsure. What now? As long as your most precious parcel was safe, you could chase the demon through this wasteland until your feathers shed and your body quieted. A queen’s people came before her always, yet queen or no you know he would come before you all the same. You did not save him on only his companion’s request, and you do not chase Jack Noir only out of duty. There is a price to be had to settle your advances, and that price is justice.
The soft murmuring of her feathers stirs you, relaxed and rigid and thoughtful and settled. What exactly it was that was settled was perhaps more frightening than any other factor. No matter how you threw the dice, the result was as fixed as she was steeled and as cutting as the steel in her hand. Snake eyes. A small star pulsed in the distance, for what reason do you chase it again but that you no longer have a choice? Turn tail and flee. ‘Flee with me’ you want to whisper, but her knife reflects in her charcoal eyes. You know a lot about knives. ‘Flee not with me then, but flee.’
You heed your own unspoken words and trail the star into the darkness, pushed on by the sound of her wings in return. The chase had not stopped, would not stop, like the tears you hadn’t noticed were collecting in your unkept fur.
You came into this world imprisoned, and your wings beat the sordid bars with every beat of your tired heart. When one stops so must the other. Your name is Jack Noir, and in your death, you know, will be your only freedom.