Reign unbuttoned his jacket collar, tugging his uniform loose with a tired hiss through his teeth. Crossing to the sink in the corner, he braced one hand along it's rim. A slip of water spilled from the faucet, it's flow gurgling down the drain. He cupped his broken fingers in the chilled stream, watching it slip through the jagged cracks. When the memories came, they where sharp and painful, blooming with bitterness of his loss. Surely it was forgivable, reaching out for her in the tense silence of the night, indulging in her presence when orders became useless and another stood watch at the helm of his flag ship.

He narrowed his eyes, peering past his own reflection. The surface of the glass lost it's polish, and it swirled the very same smoke that poured off of his body in restless waves. Opaque battleships began to form in the pattern of churning blue, their enormous hulls split open and their once proud shapes listing sharply to one side. For all the lives he was responsible for, on all the vessels he'd commanded and all the worlds he protected, there were a hundred other lives, a hundred other ships, he had condemned to the abyss.

There was screaming, hysterical screaming, voices of those he'd failed, those he'd killed. Souls eternally bound in the damnation his own had escaped. But there was one life in particular he sought out now. All the others were relentlessly pushed aside.

“Llija...”

In the mist he saw the face of a ghost staring back at him. Sad eyes, dark and hollow, set in a face of such ethereal beauty that he could not possibly be remembering her correctly. She tilted her graceful head at him. Her mouth opened, on his name perhaps, but her voice had long since gone silent. He had held her in the darkness too long, but he could never bring himself to let her go. A hundred years. A hundred years since her murder and his own, and still he kept her bound to him.

There was a feathering in the air, a change in temperature, and soon he felt a brush of movement against his back, the slip of a slender arm around his waist. Where there should have been the weight and warmth of a body, there was nothing.

No. No she isn't cold. He could never let himself think of her that way.

“Did you know? Did you understand what was happening?” His demands were met with silence, even when his body began to crack, hairline fractures deepening the gaps between his joints. The fire at the seams blazed brighter, choking the recycled air with the scent of sulfur. Breathing heavily, he hung his head, and while one hand still braced itself beside the sink, the other curled over the top of the slender hands that bound his waist.

“You could have stayed with me, had your will been stronger. You could have Ascended.” Pain twisted inside of him. Old wounds began to burn, the gaping hole at the center of his chest where a lance of electrified steel had spiked through him. He struggled to bring himself back, to anchor himself in the moment he had stolen, but ever did grief eat at him. “Did you fight? Did you even try?”

Reign shut his eyes, reaching up to press his palms against them. Just as one could not apologize to the dead, could not expect the words, no matter how profound, to comfort a wife gone to the abyss, the dead could not ease the bereavement of of those they had left behind.

When he opened his eyes again, she was gone.

Art by the incomparable whitemantis.
Reign was designed by Keedot.