Matilda Bradbury had endured practically a lifetime of labels.
Far too many for someone of her youth, she thinks. Or maybe just enough for someone of her age, being at the brink of adulthood and such.
A childhood of freak, changeling or curse to a teenagehood of odd, homely, awkward, and her least favorite, witch.
But then, almost overnight the labels began to change. She grew into her height and her complexion turned tan in the sunlight like her mother’s. Suddenly the mothers who whispered their pity for hers began dropping mending work at their back door along with whatever coins or objects they deemed worthy of the trade.
Unique took place of odd and wispy or even pretty that of homely. Awkward became well behaved and dutiful, if a bit strange. Terms less terse, more neighborly.
More marketable, marriageable even. There were only so many young people in Whitestone after all, and a tanner’s daughter was not a rough lot under the never-ending rot of the current reign.
But despite the logic of it, Matilda never could quite understand the shift. She didn’t feel any different, any more or less deserving of what she was called, until… well until now, she supposed.
Now, trying not to shift as the carriage pushed across the city’s streets there were a thousand new possibilities and for once it all made sense. Pretty, dutiful, well-behaved, witch even, was why she was sitting here while the rest of her former classmates sat shuttered in their homes. Well, those and perhaps her most important title of daughter.
Her parents saw something great in her, a fact they had never shied from sharing much to her constant embarrassment. Their daughter who could mend a hide in seconds, put the image of life back into their taxidermy, light the fire without a match and forage in the Parchwood without ever getting lost.
Pride, joy, prodigy. Their treasured hope and last effort all in one nervous bundle pulling at the fraying edges of an inherited shawl.
They looked and saw the chance to be someone history remembered, more than a nobody from an insignificant family trade in a once great town. The best, or maybe worst, she hadn’t quite decided, part was now she saw it too.
Student, servant, apprentice, mage.
Anything more than what she was now. Tonight would decide the rest of her future, making or breaking every expectation on her shoulders, giving her the pride of something new or the disgrace of now being told she was ordinary, one label she had never been cursed with before.
Yet for every alight nerve in her body, as the castle crept into view Matilda couldn’t help but smile.
She could be anything. She could be nothing.
But wasn’t it just exhilarating to have the chance.
—
From child, girl, to corpse to crone, hag, and devil, Laudna was quite sick of labels.
Of broken tongues and scraping teeth, a child in a corpse trying to prove she was good under a so-called benevolent hand, blade to her throat. Or water in her lungs, breathing in the last moments of fickle affection that smelled so pleasingly like rot. (Best friend, another label)
There’s no such thing as innocent, no matter what they call you, Delilah once supplied and Laudna thinks some part of that must be true. Yet.
They call me a monster, but all I did was love. It’s not my fault their moral hypocrisy only extends so far.
For a woman who loathed innocence Delilah was certainly the greatest lamenter of any guilt she might have contracted. Never her fault, certainly never his.
Of all places, do you think I really chose eternal purgatory in a walking corpse?
Look…yes, there you go. Hm. Halfway to a decent lady, is something I suppose.
It turns out Laudna never needed a ten-year-old for a taste of childish affection, Delilah supplied plenty of her own. Corpse one day, sweet girl the next. She could fix her hair and be called promising or ransack a sleeping camp and be called a nightmare with the same absolute pride.
But even Delilah had her moments, the words or lessons that for some reason carved themselves into her bones. Whether they were genuine or not (I am always genuine, what cause would I have to deceive you?) they stuck almost as much as the heartache that even miles of ocean couldn’t quell.
Darling, they will call you whatever they will. You could be a hag or a goddess and all they will ever see is a monster as long as you don’t fit their mold. History will never be kind to women like us. We who dare to be more.
Yes, Laudna was quite sick of labels and the never-ending monologues that followed them.
—
Friend, small-town freak, companion, ruidus-born, savior.
She who made Laudna’s long pale complexion alight with purple blush and heart prance to an ecstatic three beats a minute just for the pleasure of existing in her presence. Finally, something she could understand, something that defied oversimplified expression.
Nothing, she found, could encompass the supernova of beauty and life beside her better than Imogen.
“Does it ever bother you?” Imogen asked, her drawl still raspy with sleep, cradled between Laudna’s arms, one hand tucked over her heart the other cooling her forehead, “All the things they call you?”
Ah. The swirling taunts that threw them into the darkest, seediest tavern in this ramshackle jungle town and the mead laced shouts that promptly kicked them out. Or maybe the whispers that got them turned away from its only inn, forcing them to make camp in the tree line just outside.
A camp too wet to make a fire, not that Laudna minded. It was probably a good thing too, given how feverishly warm Imogen sparked when she woke screaming.
“No,” A lie if she squinted below the glassy surface of her memory, truth if she didn’t, “Not anymore. Does it bother you?”
Am I a monster to you?
Clearly, she had thought part too loudly because a featherlight response tickled at the edge of her consciousness. “Am I?”
Laudna’s brows furrowed at the utter absurdity of the question and most musical laughter responded, wading through Laudna’s thoughts, stretched like taffy far beyond where words could ever express them.
Of course not.
Violent lavender light and white-hot touches that melted every long-atrophied muscle in her body. The only peace Laudna’s long occupied mind had ever felt, the only eyes that had ever really looked and saw her. Imogen, oh Imogen, her saint and salvation.
“You could never be a monster, Laud. Not to me.”
And thank every inattentive god above for that.
—
Fuck-ups, a band of losers, nobodies, children.
They truly have called themselves all kinds of ungracious things these past few months. Having to prove the importance of their existence by dissecting their image and letting high stationed vultures pick at it. Label after label because the feeling of family, the weight of burdened duty, the legacy of a decent man, and an impulse for revenge wasn’t enough.
Laudna can’t help but wonder if Bertrand would be disappointed to see what they’ve been labeled, his name in the same mouthful as disingenuous insults.
All to be allowed the chance for the title of hero, to prove themselves important. All for the world’s trust to be pushed onto their shoulders because they fancied themselves qualified to handle something they couldn’t have ever fathomed.
It’s a shame, Delilah prods, rattling against her enclosure with a sharp tug.
Or maybe that’s her heart, racing as sluggishly as it can as she watches Imogen be consumed and torn apart in a horrid spray of crimson and crystal.
Capable Imogen
Vessel
Chosen Imogen
God Eater
They’ll call you accomplices , Delilah croons, that saccharine laugh seeping between Laudna’s panic, God killers, lumped in with him. It’s delicious.
Not a monster, never a monster. Not to her. Not to them. Always Imogen.
She who Laudna trusted implicitly, she who had seemed so sure, so brave even in the face of divinity’s greatest fear.
She who disappeared in a searing flare of red light to Fearne’s bloodcurdling scream as if a part of her was torn out too and the shouts of the rest of their group. Of everyone except Laudna whose tongue died between her sharp teeth, a mouth, a throat, full of ichor. Lungs full of so much she would choke before getting the privilege of a single sob.
I warned you, Laudna. History isn’t kind to those it calls villains.
So what.
Friend, hag , teammate, corpse, girlfriend, child, savior, killer , hero, accomplice.
Laudna was tired of being anything at all.