16.8
Jewel had known something was wrong when she was circling to land in Rochford courtyard and she saw Jadwiga was waiting for her alone, staring up into the crimson and purple sky.
When she came into a landing the shock of it caused her to collapse into a heap instead of settling properly. Her flame went out of her wings and coils as the events of the afternoon struck her. The wholeness of her weight toppling into the packed dirt hard enough to disturb some of the looser stones atop the wall.
It stabbed into her like a blade, the memory of seeing her smallest self, her elder sister, topple in the middle of the afternoon’s family bout, gem struggling, gasping to breath, bleeding from her mouth, growing still, unresponsive, dead. It all opened up in her heart like a chasm. Like the earth had suddenly split and swallowed all of her home.
Jadwiga had trembled, shocked into mute horror and silence cradling the far too small body, it had felt, she did not even know, Jewel had no idea what word could describe what it felt like. There was just absence, a loss suddenly so profound in that still warm body that the memory of it froze her like a statue in the courtyard.
She had held that small body, that gasped and could not breath, that spat up blood in a way that Jewel had known and felt and understood as deeply as her own body. Separated and yet so keenly aware of and horrified by.
Her daughter self had known the precise moment that the motions from Gem had ceased, when the last bubbling breath had gone out and no living one would return to it.
The screaming, desperate voice from Gwenn, the confused stone faced horror of Imre, the wailing cry of her Mother.
It all froze her as it poured back and forth between them.
But most importantly had been the whispered desperate hope she had not been able to even answer in words for how much the horror of that day had frozen Jadwiga’s throat. The lone hope that had held her family huddled around a still and cooling body in anguish, maybe Jewel could do something!
With that resolve, that prayer, that desperate hope she was moving, wyrmflame filling her enough that she more swam over the ground then walked. As Jadwiga she ran beside herself, fingers desperately clenching to her own shoulder, terrified to let go, terrified to be let go.
To become less than what they were together.
The wyrm and spawn tore through familiar halls, to the simple chambers that Gem and whichever of the Twins were staying with her had shared in Fort Rochford.
And then the door was open and she saw, her mother and sister kneeling next to the bed, she realized belatedly that Imre was in the hallway outside, frozen at the sight of her, Jewel pressed her face into the room, the most that would fit, drawing close to the still form of her first child.
-was she fighting the terror boar?
She remembered the days prior, felt them rush into her! Gem was still here!
...
No, none of her lungs were stinging in pain, but Gem was here, the whole three days since last she had visited settled into her memory just as they had with Jadwiga, her eyes welling up in tears, she wasn't gone, she wasin’t dead!
She was herself!
She was...
She was cold and hot and burning, she could not move, she could not move! all she could feel was her blood still and cloying and hurting everywhere, her flesh starving, screaming from every inch of her, her lungs sticky and clotted, full and empty, she could not move, her body would not obey her will, she was trapped broken, scattered asunder inside, aching, at war with herself, the order of her flesh gone, she could feel it contorting back on itself, fighting her, tearing her apart at her smallest parts!
Jewel recoiled from the horrific feeling, and suddenly the thing on the bed was not her, it was not trapping her in its rotting death, it was simply part of the world, separate from her, dead meat, like so many other corpses she had seen and smelled, no longer trapping her in it.
She wasn't on that bed, Gem was, and Gem was dead.
She wasn't Gem...
She did not have to keep clear which set of eyes she was looking out of were the smallest anymore, she was not so small, her lungs didn't sting, the aches inside gone, the way the cold bit at her absent, none of the little things she remembered being as Gem the last few years were present.
What had she just felt before she’d pulled back? When she remembered the last three days?
What had just happened!?
Her mother was still crying, but Gwenn had looked up to face Jewel, tears still in her eyes, briefly filled with hope but then her expression shifted.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Something grim settled, anger and fury filling her sister’s face, scowling, twisting her lips into a snarl and then she was on her feet and grabbing Jewel’s face by her lips. Nails clenching into the flesh and pulling hard. The shock of it and the lift of her flame even allowed the girl to manage moving the wyrm forward an inch.
“You absolute knaves! You stupid! stupid fools! How long were you keeping this from us?! Gem! how long were you hiding that you were spitting up blood!”
Jewel flinched, tried to pull back, but she stopped as she felt it dragging her sister off her feet. For her part Gwenn yanked hard before letting go.
“How long Gem?! How long were you hiding how ill you were!?”
She flung her hands in the air.
Jewel tried to speak, tried to fall back on what everyone had told her to do. What she’d promised Bethica she would do. What seemed undeniable now that Gem was laying there, dead before her, a corpse, empty, gone.
“I-I’m not G-Gem, I-”
Her sister slapped Jewel on the softest part of her snout, even so she felt the flesh in Gwenn’s hand screaming with the pain of the blow, the unyielding meat and bone of wyrm meeting human frailty, she could feel the world whisper of blood welling up into the bruising palm and fingers beneath the skin.
“I saw you! I saw you remember her Jewel! We both know Sister! We both know you’ve been both! You were always both, All of you! She’s here! She’s an absolutely insufferable, awful knave for hiding how badly she was doing but she’s HERE! In you! I saw you remember her!”
Jewel stared into Gwenn's furious eyes, at the tears pouring down her cheeks, the red of the weeping she had been doing before, and the snarling anger at what she knew to be true.
The wyrm looked into those eyes and shuddered in horror and wonder, as she twisted her throat, as she found the words she would have said if she was Gem right now, what Gem would have flinched away with saying but could say, after all she was Gem, remembered every day of her life.
“I had it under control...”
Another slap from the other side, another flaring set of bruises, over her sister’s knuckles this time.
“You died, you idiot! You died in a friendly bout with me and Imre! you selfish fool of a sister niece! You died and terrified poor Jadwiga so badly she couldn't speak! ”
Jewel stared, she marveled, she spoke what Gem would have said.
“I’m s-sorry, I thought it was fine. I was able to f-fix it-”
Gwenn took in a heavy deep breath, another, four more gasps before she screamed to the ceiling, to the stars, so harshly Jewel could hear her throat going raw with the emotion. When she finally stopped howling she turned back to glare on Jewel, despite her size she cowered under that glare, that fury.
“You had four heads! You had four heads and over fifty years of living between all of you and you thought it was fine?! You died coughing up blood Gem! You died gasping and drowning in your own blood! From a friendly spar!”
Jewel’s voice squeaked tighter and higher than she had in decades, and yet, just as she had with Gem’s throat. Light and gentle, childish like had always been appropriate.
“It was just a cough! It was just something new I had to spit up! I had a handle on it! It was fine, I used a working, we all tested it first, all of myselves together! We made sure it was safe! It cleared everything out and let me breathe! It was so miserable Gwenn! I could barely breathe! I couldn't have kept up with you without-”
Before Gwenn could hurt herself even more by beating on the unyielding flesh of a wyrm Jadwiga was there, slipping under Jewel’s throat and tumbling forward to embrace her sister, To hold back her fury, to squeeze her as tighter than she could ever dare as her full wyrmself, as she only ever could touch the girl as her spawn. Even then there was a creak and a groan of Gwenn’s ribs and spine under the pressure. Jewel found herself speaking with both throats.
“I-I’m sorry, I didn't know I was dying, it didn't hurt that bad, It was too soon, I shouldn't have been dying, we were the same age! I’m sorry Gwenn, I’m sorry, I didn't mean too-”
Her sister squeezed back, and the pressure cut off her words in both throats, Jewel felt Gwenn’s hands around her back, her fingers clenching through the dress Jadwiga wore, pressing her head into the longer throat of Jewel’s daughter-self, composure fully breaking, sobs and tears being ground into the scaled skin.
Voice muttering over and over how stupid Jewel, Gem, Jadwiga and Eunika were.
“You were supposed to be there for my wedding, all four of you together, you selfish fools! Now you’re dead! We are going to have to change all the plans we had! You were supposed to play with my children as their adorable little aunt!”
Jewel rumbled, spoke in a voice deeper than Gem had ever been able to use, softly, quietly, but in a way that would carry deep into her mother and sister’s bones. She felt it in her spawn’s spine and skull.
“I’m sorry Gwenn, we didn't know, I’m so sorry.”
Finally her sister fell silent, collapsing exhausted in Jewel’s embrace, well Jadwiga’s embrace but for the moment she didn't care about what was proper. Gently she set her sister down on the bed that had been meant for the taller of her spawn, turning to stare at the still form of Jewel’s first child.
Dead, a corpse, empty and unresponsive, yet it had contained a wholeness of memory of everything that Jewel had missed, all the moments up until she died, possibly, horribly something from even after she had died.
And Jewel had regained them! Jewel had been able to speak for Gem! It was important, she had to send a missive to Erhard on this, but the arms of her mother embracing her head held the Wyrm in place.
Jewel did not leave, she stayed with her family and mourned for their loss, mourned for her own death.