Constantly.[break][break]

The flicker of uncertainty in her eyes betrayed her own quiet truth to him: "It's the same for me." Had she ever met someone whose Avatarship wore them down in the same way?[break][break]

bryan delarosa and Cillian Quinn seemed so much more composed than she had ever been. Even John Sullivan in the raids of Littleroot, or Eva Morales in the Petalburg Woods, or fern delaney on the shorelines of Sootopolis felt balanced in their bond between Avatar and patron.[break][break]

"...And have you figured out a way to determine that?"[break][break]

A hand brushed a strand of dark hair out of her face, distracted as it lost itself in a mane of black curls.[break][break]

"Which thoughts are your own, I mean."

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

A new wave of heat shimmered in the air, and she shivered involuntarily at the shift in temperature, arms wrapping around herself to protect against the elements.[break][break]

"That's why I'm trying to figure out, I suppose. How much your experience mirrors my own."[break][break]

She hated this, asking him of all people for guidance. Exposing weakness invited others to exploit you, always.[break][break]

What he couldn't know was that two beings warred for dominance in her mind, making glimpses of her own agency all the more confusing to pinpoint. Even this burning desire to enact vengeance, this inherently vindictive nature that fed on her own grudges... how much of that spite had blazed in her before those deities both claimed her as their own?[break][break]

The gulf between that time and now kept widening, and widening, until that gaping chasm seemed liable to erupt as much as any volcano.[break][break]

"Some Avatars chase their patrons, but mine chased me. It feels like being... a tool, of sorts. Something wielded for a specific use, nothing more."

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

"You're right," she said, that reluctant concession tasting foreign on her tongue. "Most people don't understand. They covet the power they might gain from a deity, but remain blind to the cost they have to pay."[break][break]

Even the death of Bailey Cooper hadn't been enough to stifle that greed.[break][break]

A restlessness overtook her as he approached, its anxiety crawling like a thousand spiders over her skin. Still, she didn't move out of his reach, nor push him away.[break][break]

The lava rose behind him, as if stirred to action with each step he took forward. Goading him onwards.[break][break]

"I don't know what I'm wanted for," she confessed, silently berating herself for her honesty with him. "Only that my suffering made me worthy."[break][break]

Her hands fell to her sides, empty and lost, before a strange conviction entered her tone: possessing the phrasing of a threat, but the hushed cadence of a secret.[break][break]

"Do you truly want to know what is demanded of me?"

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

Ah, but what did he know of her, really? Or of the patrons that had claimed her, for that matter.[break][break]

Nothing good in her had drawn their attention. Of that, she felt reasonably certain.[break][break]

"I don't know how to explain it," she said, unsure of what had earned the sudden intense focus of his attention. The vulnerability of her admission? The fact that he understood her struggles, strange as they were? The perception of an opening, after many walls that denied him her confidence?[break][break]

Understanding his intentions felt at once painfully simple and frustratingly difficult. In that way, too, she supposed they were alike.[break][break]

"I can show you, though."[break][break]

A hand, tentative and uncertain, reached towards him -- seeking his own, if he'd offer it to her. He'd remember the implications of that covenant between them, back in the Petalburg Woods, where she'd glimpsed the source of the resentment that brewed in the deepest recesses of his heart.[break][break]

This time, she invited him to witness her own.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

His hand gripped her own with a surety that both startled her and didn't. The instant his skin met hers, he'd feel the slow, simmering burn of resentment constantly churning beneath the surface of her thoughts, its subtlety a far cry from the heightened state that he'd found her in back in the Petalburg Woods.[break][break]

But even dormant volcanoes could erupt, in time.[break][break]

She closed her eyes, letting herself sink deeper into the abyss that Wo-chien had sentenced her to. All around her, the ground cracked and turned dry as what little life existed here was choked from it, feeding the grudges that viciously awakened inside her mind.[break][break]

As if descended upon by a plague of locusts, a miserable void of hollowed-out discontent would carve out a home in him. An unfed hunger consumed her, and he'd feel it consume him, too: a gnawing sense that you are not enough, that nothing will ever restore you to something whole.[break][break]

So you latch onto the things that give you purpose, reaching for anything that can fill your insatiable need.

[break]

Anger flashed into focus, a raging riot of emotion that surged forth with an immediacy that abruptly thrust her forward. She pulled him against her subconsciously as she steadied herself, his hand finding a place above her heart.[break][break]

This intimately close, the connection deepened further. Channeled emotion took on a life of its own.[break][break]

She couldn't hold back the bleedthrough.[break][break]

The grudges bore faces now, some familiar to him and some not. FERNANDO SILPH. PENELOPE LIVY. Eva Morales. freya morningstar. declan walsh. These names etched themselves on the Tablets of Ruin her patron bore upon its back, his own numbered among them. Her own name reflected back at him, too, placed first above all others on this ode of grievances.[break][break]

And some faces didn't have names, but their faces flitted through her mind all the same. A man with cobalt blue eyes, beautiful and cold as they glimmered in the darkness, appeared for but a moment before this man was shoved away for another. A sudden descent into sorrow corrected itself, swerving into white-hot fury.[break][break]

This new figure possessed a coal-black glare, distantly towering over a woman whose ancient grudge kindled and revived the longer she stared back at him, causing the earth to shudder as an invisible snarl of roots raged futilely against a cage of lava and stone.[break][break]

"We will punish the world for the wrongs it has committed against us," a voice that sounded like her own and yet nothing like her at all whispered in the shadows of his mind. "We will ruin it, as it has ruined us."[break][break]

And then, all at once, this intimate link between them severed.[break][break]

She wasn't sure who pulled away first, or if either of them had pulled away at all. The haze of her own turmoil clouded her gaze, making it difficult to see the world for what it was.[break][break]

But this power cut both ways. It revealed as much of her as it did of others.[break][break]

"Show me," she rasped out then, if he could still hear her in the cavernous heart of the volcano. "Show me what your patron demands of you."[break][break]

Show me that you resent this, too.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

The same. We suffer the same.[break][break]

This discovery had affirmed his suspicions; it complicated her own, instead.[break][break]

But we are not the same, either. He believes in a future that doesn't exist.[break][break]

Like smoke, the hazy images of a lush and verdant paradise under Groudon's rule dispersed and faded. The severity in her carmine gaze dwindled in favor of a pensiveness that left her quiet as the ambience of Mt. Chimney returned. The bubbling of lava. The patter of falling stone. The bitter taste of ash greying the air.[break][break]

How hateful and oppressive all this heat had seemed, when she first entered here.[break][break]

Its warmth felt comforting, now -- as if basking in the life-giving rays of the sun.[break][break]

MATIAS SILPH's hand had moved to release her own, but she'd been the one to hold him fast this time. That unexpected realization belatedly came into focus; unable to reason with the discomfort of her own actions, she abruptly turned her attention elsewhere.[break][break]

For the first time since she'd met him, she studied the markings on his skin with more than a passing glance. She didn't recognize these symbols, didn't understand the hieroglyphics for what they were. Her fingers brushed against them with light curiosity, as if touch alone could decipher their meaning.[break][break]

"Primal energy will kill you," she stated, looking up at him with a naked honesty she'd never shown him before. Pity and understanding sat in her stare. "Groudon will kill you, as it killed its last Avatar."[break][break]

He believed he was far stronger than he was. He thought himself as invincible as the god that ruled him.[break][break]

That was a difference between them, too.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]

"Sometimes I wonder," she mused softly, "if it's because we're disposable."[break][break]

Until now, she'd let those misgivings go unvoiced. With him, this secret felt safe to admit aloud.[break][break]

Divine indifference affected him as much as her.[break][break]

"There are those who speak of their patrons with fondness, like they would a caring guardian, or a trusted ally, or even a distant comrade in arms."[break][break]

Peculiar gentleness manifested itself in her movements, born of a capacity for empathy that had never managed to fully die inside herself. Emotion had always ruled like a cruel tyrant over her. The further away she kept herself from others, the less likely it was that yokes of unwanted sympathy would bind her.[break][break]

A wry and humorless smile graced her lips.[break][break]

"Mine has never seemed fond of me, at least."[break][break]

Neither Tapu Fini nor Wo-chien, if she were to be honest with herself. Her life would be inconsequential to them, she suspected, the moment those pacts were fulfilled.[break][break]

The faint smile faded as her eyes averted away from him, like a shadow fleeing the light.[break][break]

"But perhaps Groudon is different for you."[break][break]

She'd witnessed the beautiful vision he clung to of elysian fields, of a Groudon unshackled from Rayquaza's restraint.[break][break]

His patron needed him to hope, while hers thrived on her own despair.

[attr="class","ooc"] MATIAS SILPH[break][break]