Kismet’s Tale

      Natalya found being awake in the morning the scariest thing lately. She would look for a clock first to know what time and date it was. She didn’t find any in the room she was in. She freed her arm off her husband. She pressed an arm on her top and looked at the scratches she made on her husband with a rather dull look.

She stood up, went weak on her knees for a second, before bracing herself on the wall. She picked up her clothes and shielded herself with a red-stained blanket and dragged herself out of the room. She paused on her steps at the sight of Dame Mimi.

“Madam,” Mimi said, her eyes on the red-stained blanket Natalya carried. “I can take care of the blanket, if you would be so pleased.”

Natalya handed the blanket without fuss. She entered the bathroom, got herself cleaned, and went back to her room to get dressed. She strutted to the dinner table where she was welcomed with Mimi’s welcoming gaze.

She held her head and asked the year and date.

“It’s 1923, and it should be fall soon. That reminds me, madam. Are you going to visit Lazon soon with the young master?”

She placed the spoon in her mouth. “We might visit.”

“Aww, I wish I could go.”

Natalya chewed on the egg Mimi served. She did not dislike the Tomas Family. Their hospitality and fierceness sit well with them. Even the ‘so-called’ young master who had done many terrible things was far better than the people she knew.

‘This could be myself thinking this was fine,’ Natalya thought to herself.

She had stopped counting.

She saw the Tomas Family as people who acted like she expected.  The way they acted when it comes to trouble was something she was familiar with already. She had been repeating the same nightmare and the same dream that she had stopped counting.

How many times had she redone the same conversation and the same walks? She wanted to vomit at the thought of it. Her stomach would pain her the moment she thought of those awful ‘visions’ that she had.

She thought to herself, ‘What was the point of doing this?’ and she would go on. There was a time where she secluded herself after her mind broke. There was a time where she had dragged the person who was responsible for this repeatedly.

Like a damned woman she blamed everything towards that person.

That person who had shot her in the battlefield. That person who had been bound to her forcibly through some means. During that time she had tried to find a way to break the curse. She spent uncounted times, days, weeks, months, and years figuring something out.

But all ended up in answers she could not figure out.

There was simply no way to find answers without power on her own. So she sought political power and found herself in many places in search of said powers.

However, she knew that there were two limits to what she could do.

She must not reveal the power of her Imperator’s Crest brazenly.

She must not let Mavin Tomas learn of her power.

Because she would become her greatest enemy.

In the time she did not allow herself to look meek and non-threatening, he didn’t separate to shoot her in the head. It was only through her powers that she was able to kill and save her life.

Forty-two times she had killed and tried to kill each other.

But the amount of times she was saved by him could not be counted.

As long as she did not reveal or tried to make him an enemy.

There was no way he wouldn’t save her.

No way he wouldn’t save who was in front of him.

A man who was not good or evil.

A person who acted on what he wanted to do.

But never abandoning that desire that allowed him to do what he wanted. If there was anything admirable to him was that belief that he could leave life at any moment. Letting that determine what he does, say, and think.

Forty-two times.

She couldn’t kill him after that.

While everyone was repeating the same thing. There are times where he would act differently than before. He would adapt to such scenarios with composure and think of a way out.

The only times she felt like he was lost was during the time she had dragged him to Holmia to search for ways to free herself.

She couldn’t tell him. He had suspected her and most of the time she had killed him because he suspected that she had the Imperator’s Crest. She knows that he knows that she had the crest, but was willing to judge her before acting. Once he starts suspecting her, it doesn’t end well.

He was her executor, and she was his executioner.

She was bonded to him. She hated that she could not get away from that bond that the spark had done to her. But as time passed she came to think of it as natural. Like a part of her wouldn’t be the same without him.

It felt like if she would walk this path then it would have been bothersome without him meddling about. She strived to find a better way, and at the same time she was afraid of not escaping this nightmare.

How many times had she broken down? How many times had she thought of losing her will? How many did that man pull her out of the room to bathe in the sunlight? How many times had her stubbornness placed this man in death’s door?

It was always her standing in front of him dying. Either because of other causes or because her weapon  was pointed at him.

Those cold eyes reflecting that miserable face of hers all the time.

A wound that scarred her face was nothing.

She might have been bothered by it. But it wasn’t enough to murder a man for doing his duty and she was rational enough to understand that it was because his duty. If she had killed him that day, she would think nothing of it. He thought of nothing of what he did as well, and it was normal for him to have that.

The scar made her fierce. If she did not have one then she would have only been another pretty face in a male-dominated society.

There was bloodlust, she had unkempt emotions that made her think less sometimes, but never enough to lose her mind over someone.

She had pride. She knew her charm and knew her abilities.

The war was a nightmare to her. She would not want to go to war. But all of this strangeness and mysticism seems to have started after her nightmare. Like a never-ending nightmare where she was the only one saved.

The Imperator’s Crest had chosen her. She knew that much at least. But yet at the same time she never really wanted it.

The power to control the bloom and the spark. She was Magi and a Nuller. She owned the right to rule two secret societies and yet she did not desire them. Why would she desire the battle when she desired the skies? When she wanted to view the world above the clouds.

A dream that had been with her forever. 

She didn’t want to stay in one corner of the world.

But that dream seems hard to accomplish with all these shackles and bonds.

She wondered if she had just waited patiently, maybe she could have gotten a lesson and the know-how to obtain a plane. But she had let emotions get the better of her and was involved in this quagmire called the Capital of the Empire.

What did that get her? A nightmarish cycle of seeing one man die in front of her over and over again.

She had tried to run away, cripple the man, and locked him up for her to live.. But if she went that route, she would find herself awakening to the moment when that spark happened. He would die of his own volition, and even when she had paralyzed him so she could live.

He would find a way to escape the fruitless life.

After all, his life was the trigger of her life.

She had severed his limbs, placed him in a box, and made him still so she could find a way to live long enough to break whatever she needed.

It was not enough however.

Not enough.

One day she grew tired of her cruelty.

She was so sickened by her own acts that she wondered if it was right at all. All of it because she wanted to escape this repeating hell. She was sick of everyone’s words. She was sick of everything that she had to redo.

All the bonds that she had made were reduced to ashes.

Though he might have repeated words, he still had new thoughts to give.

Even when she had done him evil such as placing him inside a box like a limbless doll. He only looked at her as if he had expected that she would have done such a thing. There was no surprise to his face when she would do evil.

She was sick of it all and she grew careless. She lost her mind, let herself act what she was supposed to do normally, only to find that her hand was cut off, used as a catalyst for a seal she didn't know existed.

A pillar of light that gave her salvation.

She felt herself laughing maniacally to the thought that all her answers could be found by the same man that had been locking her as well. If she had asked and begged, she might have found the answer.

But she didn’t want to admit it.

It was pathetic that she felt like it was a terrible joke.

She could not feel the touch of the Imperator’s Crest. She could sense the spark and the bloom that she had mastered over the course of those repeating cycles.

To think that the answer was so close. Even his reaction was different to what she had expected. She had been bonded to him through the spark and through a forced marriage. Considering what she had been through or what they were planning to do with her family. It was nothing.

Yet she did not expect that one day she would catch sight of  the same man who this time had done what he wanted to place a gun in his head. There was something wrong, she thought immediately when she had holed herself up in his room where Old Fred would not find her drinking.

That dulled face that had nothing left. As if he could finally rest his legs after walking so long. He could not achieve such a dream throughout the time she didn’t let herself be noticed. And when that dream had been achieved, he had no goal left.

Perhaps, during those times when she would awaken suddenly to repeat everything. Something like this had happened.

She understood that her thoughts of him had a mixture of spite and possessiveness. An arm was nothing to her, and yet she didn’t want to test it out if she would return if he died again. He had done something that crippled the source of spark. How could she allow him to die?

She was afraid.

And at the same time if he died and she was left alone.

Who could understand her?

She then recalled a conversation that she kept asking him.

“Are you a crow or a raven?”

She saw Mavin paused and looked away. His eyes staring a hundred yards away. He was looking at something he couldn’t find. 

He squeezed his eyes and answered what she had expected.

“I want to be a crow.”

That was always his answer.

She thought he was a raven, but in the end they were nothing more than two crows that flocked together, flying above the dead, pecking their eyes in order to survive, and sometimes flying aimlessly.

Then again, they were just broken fools licking each other’s wounds.