Requiem

Her voice in Isra's ear: always be gentle, when you can. She has to say it a thousand times. Only Requiem can hear the rust-edge tension in Isra's voice; only Requiem knows the truth of the hunts across the plagueflecked moors and scrub-steppe. Still, she loves, because love knows no bounds. Their children know no pain, no hunger. They are taught by sharp minds and Requiem closes her fists at night, staring out across the flickering wastelights, feeling the hunger in her stomach.

Requiem's mothers should not have had a child. This is a fact, a cruel one-- but a fact, nonetheless, as they have left Requiem with an affliction that is the result of their natures. She sees flickering shades in much the same way Shizuna once saw the things beyond, those great and unknowable horrors that lurk beyond a veil. What is worse -- Requiem wakes with her teeth on display, her claws dragging free from her fingertips, her throat spasming in a guttural howl. She is a kind woman with a beast's heart: Kaine's heart, given to her through blood. When the season turns cold and Requiem can feel the ache in her joints, she becomes agitated despite her best efforts.

She has to fight it, sometimes, the urge to become like her parents, to sink into the depths of what she is, to give to the urge to scream to the sky, to rend and tear and rip -- to touch the things beyond the void, the things that whisper beneath her skin. But fight it she does, because there are things that should never be learned, never be taught.

Requiem's struggles are kept to herself and Isra, who does love her (even as Requiem feels the twitch of anxiety when Isra swears, softly, that she will burn alive the people who so much as raise their voices to her; there's no need for that, does Isra not understand- ). Despite them, she is a good person. Despite the kingdom, she's a good person.

Despite the aftermath of an assassin's blade between her ribs, she is a good person.