Chapter 48: Time’s Guillotine hung for the Betrayer
In the frosted garden of frozen time, the horned Queen stared into the emerald eyes of her hooded kin, one a queen who masacred her families in the name of peace, one a scientist who desecrated corpses in the name of curiosity. The Queen and her sister, the sunlit executioner and the graceful velvetstorm.
The emerald eyes sunk further as they dried, narrowing as they observed the ashes that painted Adrei’s scaled robes, the ashes afloat as they coated a mantle of the anarchist against time. Bemused at her sister’s nonchalance at her world-bending magic, the emerald-eyed scientist’s steps lifted as they sidestepped the soil that embraced her bare feet like a polished stone, the roughness that came with Earth’s defiance nothing before mere taps of a Dragon Elder of Time.
"Sister, you have grown. Since when did you learn your flames could deny me my artifact for <Time Magic>?"
Adrei scowled as the ashen mantle pulsed, not of frustration or repulse, but of a slight humiliation that came with the scientist’s tone as if viewing caged rats with paws instead of claws. Her draconic irises now could comprehend the vague existence that came with her sister, as the ashes tarred away all unclear boundaries before them. Her amused gaze was unsettling, the slight tilt of her head ajar before the Queen with no respect but a taunting distortion.
"Your merely never grow with your nature, Coriel. Your reliance on trinklets dulled your sense as a Dragon Elder of the Woods."
"...I seem to recall you used to praise me for my...’trinklets’, sister."
A hesitation marred Coriel’s voice, as she stopped before the walls of stilled petals. The floating hues that threatened to spill without falling even as the scientist grasped them, the smooth, unbending beauties against the authoritarian that falsely claimed time as their own.
"And should the one who annilated our families really lecture me for my ’nature’, Sister?" The heaviness of the emerald-eyed dragon’s words dissonant with the light playfulness as she cradled the petal, a fragile gesture almost as if she is a tragic heroine, if not for the disinterest pupil that skated the the veins of the petal.
"I won’t deny for the necessary cruelty I comitted, Coriel. Yet among the elders...perhaps it is only you who haven’t moved on." Adrei’s tension in her brows unwinded like cut string, the realisation that her sister perhaps was carried with grief tainted her resolve, if not for the oily syllables that dripped from her sister’s lips.