The corridors that led back to her chambers had never seemed so long, nor so suffocatingly still. The air trembled faintly around her, heavy with smoke and the ghosts of her own fury, as if the palace itself feared to breathe in her presence.
Eris Igniva walked like a storm disguised as a woman, head high, eyes alight, trembling from the inside out. Her night dress clung to her like liquid fabric, the scent of scorched marble and broken glass trailing in her wake like perfume.
Oh, but rage was such an exquisite thing on her. It glimmered beneath her skin like gold beneath flame, beautiful, terrifying, and utterly consuming.
Yet even rage could not disguise the ache beneath it. The kind of ache one does not show to the world, not even to herself.
For beneath the fury, she trembled with something far more dangerous than anger, hope's corpse, still twitching.
