My hand slaps over my mouth.
Rissa.
“Great Divine…” A dry sob tears out of me like a husk torn from desiccated corn. They killed her. They killed her right in front of me, as if she were nothing but a nuisance, a life not meant to bother with.
My eyes well up, and it hurts. Like the dagger was pierced through my chest. They could’ve used the same drug to knock her out. Could’ve spared her. Instead, they stabbed her through and left her to crumple to the ground.
Rissa and I have a complicated relationship, stemming from years of resentment. But…I understood her. She used her wits, honed her seductions, learned to get ahead in a world of men, and then she wanted to forge a new path, doing whatever she needed to do to protect herself and get what she wanted.
I respected that. And when it comes to saddles, respect is the last thing society ever gives them.
Saddles fill the wants of men and women, work to satisfy sensual cravings. They perform and please, actualizing desires, earning both a sense of power and their own wealth by doing so.
And what happens? People hate it. They call it a sin, a vice. They beat it down. Claim that saddles are deplorable and dirty, the bottom dregs of society, unimportant and low-ranking. Except, behind closed doors, those very same people expect to have their urges satisfied. Expect to be pleased and pleasured, brought bliss and assuaged of their basest of needs.
And yet, a saddle isn’t even worth a life.
She’s just a saddle.
As if that made her less. As if she was so beneath them her death didn’t matter.
But it matters. It matters to me. She mattered.
I wish I could’ve told her that. I wish, back at that garden, when she squeezed my hand in a rare show of warmth, that I’d have squeezed harder. Because she was strong and smart, and she deserved that new life that she wanted. The one she worked so hard for, and now, she’ll never have it. All because of me. All because I asked her to take a walk.
Tears stream down my cheeks in chunks, as if my sorrow is heavy. It feels heavy, like a weight pressed down on my heart, and I don’t know how long I cry for her, but I hope I’m not the only one. Because Rissa wasn’t just a saddle. She was a saddle and she was also many other things too, and none of those things meant she didn’t deserve to live.
When my tears stop, I feel dried out. I don’t know if it’s just the grief or if there are still some aftereffects of whatever drug they used on me, but my whole body drags. They must’ve kept me unconscious for days to get to Second Kingdom. The thought that I was left vulnerable to them like that makes me shiver.
I might not have been in this place in over a decade, but I remember this heat. I remember the grit that seems to be all over me too, of traveling through the dunes, of being caked in its grainy wind and baked through by the sun.
Funny how, when I first came here, my ribbons had only just started to sprout from my back.
So painful coming in.
So painful taken out.
I hated them then, but now, I’d give anything to have them back.
Absently, my fingers go to my back, to the empty spots where only smooth skin now remains.
Every single one of them, gone.
My ribbons and I have had so many parallels that I never appreciated before. As if my whole journey has been exhibited through their presence.
Like the fact that my new beginning here in Second Kingdom also marked the new beginning of them growing from my back. After that, I kept them hidden, just like I kept myself. Resented them, like I resented myself. Then, when I was finally coming out of my shell, so did they. Just thinking of the way they caught me, flirted with Slade, wrapped around his ankle…
I’ll never have that again.
Just as I was coming into my own, so were they.
But then, I was cut down to the core, and with every strike, so were they.
That night marked an end for me and for my ribbons. Yet it was an ending I badly needed. I needed to be forced to stand on my own two feet, without anything to catch me. I only wish they could have been spared that same journey. But I needed to be cut down to finally rise up on my own like a phoenix from the ashes.
I wish my ribbons would do the same.
But there is no phoenix, and the only thing resembling ashes are in the Ash Dunes that reside somewhere in this Divine-damned kingdom.
A noise jerks me out of my thoughts, and I drop my hand and turn around just in time for the door to swing open as a woman steps in. She has a white wimple draped over her head, the fabric thick, stiff, and perfectly creased on either side. It completely covers her hair, and all that’s visible is a square opening for her face that sets at the edges of her cheeks and the middle of her forehead.