Silence and Screams
Summary: A pretty poor first step back into writing about Noragami for the AU, but I wrote something, at least.
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Dark mountains grew hazed with the gray misty shroud flowing up from its feet in the far horizon, and about them a settlement glimmered out from the shifting fog, like a gem shining through the murkiness of a river. A grayness flooded the heavenly dome, a belly of knitted, thick clouds that shone only faint with the paleness of day’s light. Everything was gray in this place, from the turned dirt roads that sprawled in every direction too and from the village, and the river which rushed through like a sliver of a dagger across flesh. The water was whitish-gray, slowly churning down southward with streaks of appeared to be white fish rushing along. Strands of grass, once an emerald green, were flecked with a shroud of frost, a waving sea of snow that covered hill and mound, and soon were consumed by the fog as it thicken and spread.
Alexandra watched them all, mounted upon a silver-and-white wolf, with eyes as bright as flames and as crimson as blood. She did not quite know what the sight before her was - she had seen the sprawling city of Val Royeaux, and had walked the flagstones of Denerim. But this quaint…village, as her guide spoken of, was quiet, all silence seeped away, except the slow rolling river. The water seemed thundering, in comparison.
“Why is it quiet, Faline?” asked Alexandra, watching dark smears slither through the fog, like shadows treading across snow. People, she notes. Followers that called her here, for one of the Immortal Seven, to give them mercy and dignity, an escape from the plight of the mortal realm.
“They are expecting death, Lady Alexandra,” said the old guide, with her graying hair tugged high into a tight knot, and her wrinkled face drawn hard and stern, but her voice was kind when she spoke, as soft as a boulder could be. Her tiny, beetle black eyes had seen her grown once, before she had died by the hand of the Dread Wolf. A failure, it had been, when my regalia failed to protect me. But she could not hate her children - for that was what they were to her, children, who needed her, now and always. I lost my memories, but I have theirs to fill me. Though its so much pain, I will cling to it.
She stares at them, and through that shifting, t\hick fog, she sees thin, ragged figures, too small to seemingly stand. And yet they were, walking about their lives, even as blotted figures watched with dozen or more eyes. Evil spirits, monsters who she needed to die. Alexandra asked, “Can I not kill the spirits? They will be able to live. I know I can do it, Failina.”
In her mind’s eyes, she saw the old guide’s mouth touch into a faint smile, though it soon fell away into a horrible grimace. “No, my lady. They pray for death, and it is death to both spirit and man you must give now. Had they not…then perhaps they could.” Her eyes soften when they stared at her, a flash of sympathy, more emotion that she had ever gotten from the lady before. “It’s okay. I spoke to the Silent One’s guide. He promises his master’s forgiveness in this act.”
Forgiveness for them, not for me, Failina. Amayian had given them mercy? It was more than what she had expected from the cold, distant god, who spoke rare in the Heavenly Accords. But everything a god does is right. Mortals are the ones who created good and evil. We do what we must. She wished she could ask her previous incarnation what she should do…
Alexandra merely nodded, a pain tightening with her chest. This is something I had never done, not even in my other lives. She does not know how she did now, but she knew, somewhere, that this was the Amayian’s duty.
She wished she could had blocked the screams from her head, but she did not. She listened, and listened, and when she began to cry, she listen harder. Because even if this was the mortals wish, she still wanted to know that their fear was acknowledge, and that she love them all, as her children.