View source for Riend (prime)/Vignettes: Different

''This vignette is based of the player's log of an in-game event.''

The rain followed her through the streets, soft and steady, masking the sound of her footsteps as she crossed Cheridan Avenue. Riend kept her hood pulled low, her jacket drawn close around the package hidden beneath it. By the time she reached the arch of the temple, her clothes clung damp against her skin. She offered the monks a brief nod and climbed the worn steps to the storeroom.

Once, this chamber had been her refuge. Now the glow in its walls seemed dimmed, as though the stone itself shared her fatigue. She set the parcel down in the center of the floor and loosened the string. Soggy paper fell away, revealing a mithril chest. She studied it in silence, circling once, twice, four times, as though hesitation might hold back what waited inside. For years she had kept these things buried. To open the chest meant remembering, and remembering meant choosing: to force it down again or to let it break her.

She drew a locket from beneath her blouse, silver filigree strung on a ribbon of azure. Inside, a painted portrait smiled up at her, raven hair, blue eyes, opposite a lock of hair bound with a cerulean tie. Her brow furrowed. She remembered when it had seemed so simple, before she learned how easily right and wrong blurred when twisted by another’s hand. Even now she felt the pull of him somewhere in the city, awake, unsettled. She snapped the locket shut.

With a faint, defiant smile, she tugged a pin from her hair. She had thrown the chest’s key into the waters off Stone Island years ago, a childish rebellion after he had mocked her. The gesture had felt like freedom then. Now it seemed only fitting. Keys were unnecessary. She was a locksmith.

The lock yielded quickly. The lid creaked open, and the memories poured out like breath held too long. She fell back on her heels, tears clouding her eyes, and the storeroom gave way to another place.

A garden, pristine and untouched, lay before her on Stone Island. The air smelled of salt and damp stone. A sirenflower drifted down, its petals stained with red. She reached for it. At her touch the bloom turned black and crumbled to ash between her fingers. She shook her head, willing the vision away.

It shifted. A ballroom. Music she could not hear, a rhythm her body still remembered. Grishom waltzed with a raven-haired girl. She knew her face, knew what was coming, and still could not look away. His lips brushed the girl’s cheek before the dagger slid into her heart.

Riend cried out. Her knees struck the floor of the storeroom. Dust mixed with her tears. She pressed her palms against the stone, gasping for air. It had been foolish to think opening the chest would strengthen her. Memory was not a weapon. It was a wound.

“I lived this once,” she whispered in Sylvan. “Why must I live it again?”

A hum stirred at the edges of her thoughts. Madelyne. Even with the bond severed, the imprint lingered, a dull ache behind her eyes. Green light bled into her vision, mercurial and shifting. When it cleared, she was no longer in the storeroom but on the rooftop of a bathhouse, toes at the ledge. Madelyne’s presence coiled through her limbs, guiding her forward. Below, reflected light shimmered on cobblestones slick with rain. Fear had not touched her then, not until Madelyne turned her power on those Riend cared for. She saw Erreim’s body jerk like a puppet, dragged toward the fall. The terror of that memory broke her back. She collapsed in the storeroom, trembling, brushing tears from her cheeks with unsteady hands.

Her fingers reached into the chest. Silk spilled across her lap, emerald green, its surface embroidered with spiraled wisps of golden blazestars. The gown pulled her into another memory, one far more recent. The tower. His voice.

“I was never a good man,” he had said, a sorrow beneath his tone.

She had believed that long before he spoke it. She had pressed him then, demanded answers about the women he had murdered, all of them carrying Madelyne’s likeness. His answer had been cold. They had stirred something in him, but only as ingredients stirred in a vial. She had asked if he had ever cared.

“I cannot say I did not harbor some feelings,” he replied with a smirk. “Why, jealous?”

Her denial had risen instantly, even as her heart betrayed her. She reminded herself, over and over, that she did not care. That she could not.

His voice had dropped then, raw and sharp. “I did not murder thousands, not until the Shadows. Althedeus took my life, carved out the pieces he found weak, and stretched the darker parts until they consumed what remained.”

She winced at his vehemence. For a heartbeat, she wanted to believe he had freed himself of Althedeus, that he was not still the monster who had tried to kill her and bind her soul. “And what has filled those holes now that he is gone?” she asked quietly. “Revenge? Hatred? Hope?”

His smirk returned, softer now, fire in his eyes dimming to embers. “Wine?”
A pause.
“You?”

She tilted her head, pretending not to understand, though warmth rose unbidden to her cheeks. “Had you asked me a month ago,” she murmured, “I would have answered conviction.”

Their eyes held for a moment too long. She looked away, chastened by the danger in it.

The guards were drawing near, boots striking against the stone. His voice dropped again, quieter, stripped of mischief. “If you must know,” he said, “you were different.”

She froze. The word lodged in her chest like a blade. “Different?” she whispered.

His gaze did not falter. “Different.”

Her heart pounded. She searched his face for mockery, for the familiar mask, but there was nothing to find. The silence between them stretched taut, and then he leaned in, his lips brushing hers with a familiarity that did not belong to this moment. It was not rough, not hurried, but gentle, echoing something long buried. The softness of it left her more shaken than any violence could have.

She had fled the tower with her chest heaving, his kiss still burning on her lips, the echo of that word in her ears.

Now she knelt in the storeroom, the gown fisted in her hands, dark spots betraying her tears. Her voice was quiet, as if he might still hear her, and heavy with sorrow.

“Not different enough.”

She drew a long, unsteady breath and reached into the chest again. Another relic waited, and with it, the rest of what she had forced herself to face.