Goldblight

KIERAN

He towers over you, cutting a stark shadow in the boiling summer sun, a tank of a man. The heavy plating that has overtaken him scatters the sunlight like the surface of a calm sea, dancing rays caught in the geometric sprawl of fool’s gold. His fangs, long and worn and yellowed, split his face in a wretched grin as the slightest bead of golden blood drools out of the corner of his lips. The result of all your work.

You, though, are doubled over before him, crumpled in his shadow as you have always been and shall always be. Blood spills from you in such quantity that you can hardly nail down where all it’s coming from; a gash across your skull, splitting your black locks and staining them with your curse. A bruise that broke skin and which leaves your ribs feeling as though they’ve split by his fist.

And, finally, occupying this dilating moment of horror with you, is the audience. The small crowd of bandits gathered to oversee your ‘training’, your father’s most trusted men. Where they started eager to watch this troublesome brat get sorted out, their uproar has subsided into wide-eyed stares and hushed murmurs. One of them makes eye contact with you, meeting the wild-eyed gaze of an eye wreathed in blood and absolutely burning with addled rage.

A memory the crowd would surely carry with them, when soon they would find themselves under your employ.

Finally, after a moment of simply revelling in his handiwork, Kieran bellows to you: “Come on, kid! You’re supposed to be a Goldblight, right? Get up and fight!” Fulfilled amusement soaks his taunting, as he slams his foot down by your head, the thud shaking the ground enough that his lackeys clearly feel it.

Your left hand, shaking, draws back towards your belt. Your other hand begins to push you up, not daring to look at your father as you start to drag yourself to your feet.

Until you are ready to strike.

You look up at him, finally, teeth clenched and gaze furious. You throw yourself into him, hooking your claws into his pyrite armor and begin to climb him! Putting your lithe body to good work, you scale him like a mountain, pulling a hidden shiv from the waistband of your pants. He staggers back, surprised by your sudden show of force, one hand shooting up to try and grab you and pry you free—just one thin second too late.

Your shiv finds his throat, forced with all of the strength you can muster up through his jaw and into his skull. It crashes through bone and shears through muscle, and you hear him make a sharp gurgling sound as he starts to stumble, eyes wide and, for the first time, showing fear.

…

If only.

He shakes his head, as your shivering hand drops in place by your limp body, close to your waistband. He turns around, sparing a glance to his clearly uncomfortable audience. “Get him cleaned up.”

By the time you look up again, his gilded form is all but gone into the treeline, leaving you alone and simmering with a bunch of very, very hesitant bandits.

Next time, you mutter to yourself. Next time.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
AURELIA

The two of you share your tent, spared the scrutiny of your father for the night and the pain of your mother’s non-presence. But tonight’s… different.

You’ve never seen a human like this. Not ever. You knew she went through something with Kieran, but… what could have happened between them? What humiliation did he subject her to that she looks like this?

The moment you started climbing into your tent, you saw it. She was practically vibrating under her blankets, entangled with them and staring at the wall of the tent across from her; the same spot you’re supposed to be getting into. You hesitate, but even now, you know you’d rather be around her than him.

You awkwardly slide into your spot around a foot from her, and into her gaze. She gnaws at her lip with enough force that her blighted teeth are loosing gold from it, and she doesn’t even notice. Her white-knuckle grip shears the fabric of her blankets, and she doesn’t even notice. Her pupils are wide open, as if to catch every detail of the predator that’s sure to spring through the tent wall she was staring at any moment now.

“Aurelia…?” you carefully ask, waving a hand a very comfortable distance from her face.

“What,” she says, more of a statement than a question. Her voice is strained, as if the mere act of talking seemed like a waste of effort to her, so desperate to conserve that energy for… whatever drives the gears that are clearly grinding in her head. She has practically torn her bedding to ribbons, raking her claws through it.

She’s like a wild animal… a scared, cornered animal.

You glance anywhere in the tent but her, but there’s very little for your gaze to settle on BUT her. You can’t turn around, because taking your eyes that far off of her is a non-starter—not because you fear her, but because you have to be afraid of her on behalf of someone else.

And… you can’t just let her stew like this, more or less alone.

Carefully, you reach out. You don’t say anything, you just set your hand, palm up, between the two of you. You watch her pupils dart down to stare at it for a few long moments.

Haltingly, she reaches out, and presses her palm against yours. You gently wind your fingers into hers, and she suddenly squeezes your hand hard. The same white-knuckle grip on reality itself that she’d subjected her blankets to, but you’re strong, you swear.

You stay there with her, in silence. Her gaze stays fixed on your entwined hands, until eventually the fire that’s burning inside her skull is doused by the gentle rhythm of rain pattering on the roof of the tent and she begins to drift to sleep.

You’re glad to be able to calm her, if even for a moment. You’re glad to have this moment with her, to show her that you’re with her.

Someday, you’ll be glad that, if nothing else, this was your last moment with her.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
AVERY

How can he be envious? Envious of what you’re going through? He sits there, lips pulled into a taut sneer as he watches the blood drool over your lips. He looks at you like he thinks he’d bleed slower, or at least with more grace. As the smothering heat of a summer day starts to finally burn off, you can barely feel the cool breeze that rolls through this little clearing, buried as the sensation is under the stinging, aching, burning and pinching that every movement invites.

“Why did he pick you, again?” he asks with a scoff as he watches you test each of your teeth in turn to make sure they’ll stay in your mouth, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. He barely merits your attention, contending as he is with the infinite threat that your father might return to finish the job. You almost hope he does. But for the moment you spare him a glance, he sees you as many have lately—a hunched over animal, staring at him with a single wild eye that shakes in its socket, the other shrouded by blood-matted hair.

“Because I’m older. And as soon as I die the same way Aurelia did, he’ll pick you, don’t worry. And you’ll get the same treatment, and unlike us you’ll fucking deserve it,” you spit, between wiping the blood from your mouth and choking back the desire to lunge at him and sink your teeth into his throat. If you have to soak in another minute of his jealous disdain, that might be what finally does you in.

“Yeah? Hope so. Because lemme’ tell you, runt,” he says, leaning towards you in a way that makes you almost flinch. “Unlike you, I can take it. Dunno’ what the hell happened to you two to make you into such wimps, but I’m sure dad’s saving the best for last. He knows full well what he’s doing, and I get it. ‘Cause if you survive, maybe you’re worth a damn. But you’re not, and you’re gonna’ go the same way Aurelia did, and you’ll finally be out of our way.”

As soon as the last syllable leaves his mouth, your fist is crashing into it at full force! Even injured as you are, you can’t help but throw yourself into him, snarling and thrashing with unkempt fury. He tries his hardest to pry you off, but you rake your claws across his face deeply enough to cut one of his eyes out, making him SCREAM louder than you’ve ever heard anyone scream. You hesitate for a moment, briefly stunned out of your fury by the sheer volume of blood you’ve spilled…

But you commit.

He staggers back into the clearing, struggling to stand up and trying his best to fight back against you, but you punch him again in the face hard enough to break his nose. You bear all of your weight down on him as soon as you feel his hand reaching up to wrap itself around your neck, managing to force him to tumble over and into the grass.

The two of you wrestle for a moment, him clearly dazed by his inability to see—and his one wild eye greets your two, as you pull his head up by his neck and SLAM it down onto a rock. His hands instantly loosen from your throat, and you pull him up again and slam him back down... again, and again, and again, until and some time after he falls limp in your grasp.

Panting, wheezing, your hands planted in the dirt on either side of his broken skull, you just… look. Two conflicting thoughts both flare into your mind like fireworks streaking into the open night sky—regret and triumph. One falls aside, knocked astray by the other.

You lift yourself off of him, gold dripping from your shaking claws, staring down at him.

And you spit in his broken face.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
HERA

Judgment.

Nothing else. Never anything else. Hera was not a woman so much as a statue; one which was often positioned to loom over you, silent and always, always frowning. She was not mute, but she spoke sparely if at all. Though she didn’t bear your curse, you wondered what it was that ran through her veins if neither gold nor blood—for she clearly had none of the human warmth that blood would bring.

Her paucity of emotion allowed you to project a lot onto her weary visage. Though her expression was no different a moment ago when she was staring into the grass, as soon as her gaze turned onto you, you could read nothing but sneering judgment. Surely, though, if the expression she wears means judgment, then she must have found the lovely forest undergrowth truly wanting.

You’d always felt that she was something more. More than you, more than Kieran, more than all of this. Kieran was a wretched man, but dominated though he is by his instincts and impulses, her presence seemed to drag even him down to reality, as if he was afraid that one misstep would see him turned to ash by her disapproving glare. As she said so little, her presence was less that of a parent, or a guardian, or even a human, and more like a God whose unspoken, constant judgment dominated every part of your family life.

There was a little of her ambition behind every blow your father dealt to you. There was a little of her poison in every one of his words. You’d never felt either from her, only ever in those to whom she whispered. You wondered if she wanted legacy and power even more than Kieran ever did, because while Kieran was a stupid brute content to pillage and fight until the day the golden blight would claim him… the scale of the control she held, the strings she so gracefully and so chillingly guided, made you terrified to imagine what it was all for.

You knew she had a sort of… malicious intellect. She couldn’t be sated by simply slaking her immediate impulses like her idiot husband. She watched as the pieces of her dreadful machine steadily slid into place, and further with barely reserved disgust as they began to squirm back out of place. Aurelia was, to her, a failure. Though they were alone together for hours, she spoke no words to her daughter the day before she died.

You know, somehow, you just KNOW that it’s because she knew Aurelia was a lost cause, and had already discarded her in her plans.

She was simply waiting for Aurelia to die, so that she could move on to plan B. You.

When your father finished his training sessions with you, she was always there to stoically patch you up—but at the same time, the way she looked at you, you knew she was appraising you. How strongly you winced when she moved your broken hand, how much you seemed to seethe from the humiliation of another defeat, how faint you would get as blood poured down your face. You could only ever read disappointment on her face, like you weren’t as strong as she wanted you to be.

Until that day.

You thought it would be a moment of triumph like it was with your brother, but the buzzing static that overtakes your chest feels different this time. Kneeling over her body, you know now that she bleeds like any other. She’s no immortal, no God, and clearly no evil mastermind. Or… was she? What was that look on her face?

As you hooked the blade around her throat, as you overpowered her, though she struggled against you, you could see… a smile tugging at her face. In the heat of the moment, under the thick evergreen canopy and in the dead of night, you couldn’t quite tell—and that uncertainty sticks to your soul as her blood does to your quivering hands.

Was it perplexed fury? Amusement? … Had she finally judged you worthy, and this was what she sought all along? Had you yet again allowed her to puppeteer you, even in death? Are you an unwitting cog in her machine forevermore?

Will you ever know?

Your brother was a truly despicable man who neither deserved nor received any remorse, and who no one, not even your father, would truly miss. But your mother… your tenuous rebellion feels all too real, now.

As you leave the creek behind, one question hangs around your neck like a noose. Every member of your family wanted something; infamy, money, peace…

But what was it that Hera gave her life orchestrating?