Chapter Text
The first time Elalas glimpses any part of Mana’Din’s face, it is at dinner.
Elalas sits at the high table, and hates every minute of it. It is too strange. Too different. She had only begun to get used to these dining halls in the first place, to taking her meals and carrying them off to some quiet corner, as many people do. Eating with habitual haste and silence.
Sitting in the clamour of the hall, forced to stay put by the expectations of her latest ascent through the ranks, is… difficult. There are too many people. Too many voices. Too much going on. She wants to grab her plate and run. Or even just run; her apatite has fled her completely. But she thinks that might come across as a weakness.
She is not terribly popular with many of the other high-ranking elves. Not as unpopular as she supposed she would be. Most of them have treated her with courtesy enough, come to it. But there are still those who eye with obvious disdain. Who speak of her roots. Who argue her every point in the ‘meetings’, where Mana’Din invites her opinion for reasons she can scarcely fathom.
Few of Elalas’ suggestions have been popular. She doubts many of them will be implemented.
Her discomfort is badly disguised, and she looks over to see if her supposed patron in all of this mess has noticed.
And then she stills, because Mana’Din’s mask is open.
Towards the bottom, where Elalas has become accustomed to seeing only a blank, carved, unmoving mouth, there is now an opening. The mask halts at the end of Mana’Din’s nose, and beneath the edge of it there is now plain flesh. Lips. Teeth. A chin. Elalas has always known there was simply a face beneath the façade, and likely a pretty one. But actually seeing it is another matter, it seems. She cannot help but stare for a long moment, as Mana’Din’s lips part around her fork, and her tongue licks the corner of her mouth.
As she turns, and looks to Elalas; and her mouth twitches into a small, worried frown.
“Are you alright, Elalas?” Mana’Din asks.
Elalas snaps her gaze away from her face.
“Fine, my lady,” she replies, and manages to inject as much derision into the title as possible.
It earns her some annoyed glances around the table. But Mana’Din herself only nods in acceptance, still frowning just a bit, and then resumes the conversation she had been having with one of Dirthamen’s delegates. Who are, of course, replete through her territory. Though they at least tend to be better behaved than Elgar’nan or Mythal’s people, Elalas dislikes their presence in this situation even more than the situation itself.
She decides it is because one misbegotten ‘leader of the people’ is bad enough to deal with. The older models are even worse. They have had time to settle into their corruption, after all. To make a real art form of it. Mana’Din, at least, is inexperienced enough that the rest of the world can get by.
Shaking the thoughts from her head, she manages to focus on eating. Swallowing down a few more bites of food, until the first high-ranking elf leaves the table. That lets her be the second, and that is better, she thinks. Less noticeable.
There are messages for her in the gate room. Some coded, some not. One of her contacts by the stables gives her another to add to the pile. She goes through the ‘official’ news first. Census reports and inventories, complaints from various settlements, from their leaders and representatives and from members of the general populace, too. There is a situation surrounding an uprooted Spirit Vault that might make for a decent mine, that she has been hesitant to forward the reports on because it is a good opportunity but getting anything functional in a hurry is probably going to require blood.
Elalas is not eager to volunteer anybody for any chopping blocks. So far things have been good on that front. Mana’Din does not have bodies to spare. But it cannot last.
She worries over how to bury the matter for another month, or year. The head of the settlement near to the vault is getting impatient. The opportunity to make life in that village a little more comfortable holds more appeal to the people in charge, it seems, than keeping everyone under their leadership alive and well.
When she finally goes to bed that night, there is a knot between her shoulders from too much time spent bent over her desk. Her muscles are not used to straining that way, and she knows she holds herself awkwardly at it; forgetting what one hand is doing while she writes, or leaning too heavily on the other. Spending too much time peering at things from awkward angles. Forgetting there is an actual chair she can sit in.
Her bed is firm. Still, it has taken her years to be able to sleep in any bed at all. She cannot abide by the wealth of cushions and blankets that some of these elves seem to favour.
The luxury she grasps for, though, is the map of stars that spreads in beautiful reflection of the evening sky across her ceiling. That one, she took. That one, she could not resist.
She watches the clouds drift across the moon’s broad face as she lays back and abandons the waking world for sleep.
On the fringes of her dreams, she passes by the pieces of memories. The camp. The desert. The forest, and mountains. Meadows and tangled groves and camps from her childhood. Lakes and rivers. And then the camp again, and she spends some time toiling, before that scenery shifts and she finds herself back in her bed chambers again. Lying on her bed again.
The moonlight is brighter than it should be. The ceiling is not a ceiling at all, it seems, but an opening to the actual sky. So close it feels as if she might reach out and pluck the stars from the fabric of it, like diamonds.
She stares at it for a moment, and even reaches up to trail her fingers through the mist of the clouds.
A chuckle rings through the air.
She looks over, and sees a figure leaning in her doorway. Mana’Din.
Mana’Din in her half mask, with her mouth visible and smiling. In flowing, fluttery white robes, that trail without the hard edges of the armour. She stares in the sort of distant surprise of dreams, at the exposed skin of the other woman’s arms and legs. The delicate beads that drape over the tops of her thighs and the low ‘v’ of her dress, which is… uncharacteristically sparse.
“My lady?” Elalas asks. And the title does not sound like it usually does. Does not lay like it usually does on her tongue, either. There is no heaviness to it. It feels light. Almost playful, like when her nanae would call her mother such things.
Mana’Din is silent for a moment. Lips curving into a soft, secretive smile. But then she pushes away from the wall. Heads towards the bed, and leans down, and presses a gentle kiss to the corner of Elalas’ mouth.
Her breath stops.
The moonlight frames the leader as she strokes Elalas’ face, and then kisses her full-on. Soft and tender, as if Elalas is made from spun glass. The sweetest, honeyed kiss she has tasted in dreams or out of them since… she cannot even recall. It has been too long. But it is lovely. Enchanting, and enchanted.
At first.
At first it is such a shockingly considerate, reverent sort of touch, that it is all she can do to accept it. To lay there in the dream, her mind blank against the implications, and simply be kissed with softness.
But then Mana’Din pulls back a little, and there is a dark glint in her gaze. Her hands close over Elalas’ wrists, hard and fierce as manacles. Cold. Black, spider veins spread across the surface of her mask. Spilling out from the markings on its brow. Bleeding outwards until every inch of white has gone pitch black instead, and Mana’Din’s eyes are pools of fire.
The bed at Elalas’ back is no longer a bed at all. But the framework of a sacrificial altar. And she is tied to it, chained, as the moon turns to a scorching sun, and illuminates a field full of graves.
“Thank you for your service,” Mana’Din tells her.
“No,” she begs. “No, please. Please not this. Please.” She shakes her head, but it can scarcely move. The monster takes her hands back, but it does not free her. The stone of the altar itself seems to be swallowing her whole. Rising up in harsh spikes that split the skin at her back, and begin to slowly saw into her torso. Her neck. Her limbs.
“Your sacrifice will not be forgotten.”
She screams.
She wakes up, in the still darkness of her room. Panting. Frozen in place, and for a moment she is terrified that she will never move again. Strange shadows seem to loom in the light from her ceiling. Everything feels wrong, feels unsafe and exposed and too vast, too dark.
But then she wrenches herself sideways, and topples off of the bed. Her palms and knees smack against the floor. She heaves, not quite vomiting, but close to it. The close surface against her skin has a grounding effect. It lets her take a minute, to blink back the darkness in her vision. To remember where she is, and realize what has happened.
She grabs the blanket off of her bed, and crawls under it.
Dawn finds her as a huddle ball wedged between her bedposts and the wall.