The 8th Noble
Reina Daival
And so that was that, was it? Colette rubbed her nose bridge, weighed the words and found nothing. Perhaps the most horrifying part wasn't how similar Colette and Serina were but rather how similar all three of them were together. Too damn stubborn to listen, too sure of themselves to give the other a shot.
In the end what Reina said was true and she had never been the right person for Colette to try and guide. It hadn't felt that way at the start, but the more time that they spent together the less common ground they'd found.
To that end Colette was at the very least proud of herself, even if it ended in spectacular failure. No doubt the redhead would hold this against her, but if Reina wanted to be wrong in Colette's eyes then would be allowed to be wrong. The fire cracked behind her back as she watched her now former student leave. The dead look in her eyes betrayed her deeper exhaustion. Not just with this, but with the galaxy itself.
In the silence of the fury, the whipping winds outside began to hiss. A cold whistle echoed through the forge like a stark reminder of just how alone Colette truly was once again. Nothing more than a girl trying to push against a rock that was infinitely bigger than she could ever comprehend. The girl who refused to ground herself in the reality of a galaxy that she'd never grown up in.
The taking never stopped. The world bit off every piece that it could get, and if the world wanted to take something from her at this moment…
Colette gently patted her hip until she found the cross-section hilt that was attached to it. For a second her grip paled around its songsteel finish. Her jaw clenched and she turned around to face the fire. It would have been so easy to feed on this anger right now. To act on petty impulse to destroy something she knew to be precious to Reina even if the would-be 'knight' tried to pretend that it wasn't. In some part of her mind she could already see the way the internals would spark if she would accidentally drop it into the glow. She could picture how the songsteel and the rest of the components would intermingle into one big unusable mess.
But even so, she wasn't that cruel. That was the part that Serina fed from and the one that Reina wanted to feed too. They chose anger because it was easy, because at the end of the day it made them right. One was consumed by it, the other one wielded it for power, and given what Colette had heard she was unsure who the labels would fall upon.
She put the hilt on one of the nearby workbenches with a message:
Return to Knight Reina Daival if found, or
Everest Vale
for safekeeping.As for Colette herself there was no longer anything for her here. The Hidden Path had never been hers to walk and she had recently been told she lacked the spine to pick up any other cause. Her gaze fell upon the door leading outside into the storm. She knew herself well enough to survive, and right now…
… Right now she wanted to be anywhere else but at this forsaken hellhole of an enclave.
She put one gloved hand on the door handle and turned around to take one last look at the forge. What a horrid place to work, she thought, and gently opened the door to step outside and into whatever came next.