Anima's smile remained unbroken.
Her tender words: "You are loved."
And she made no attempt to dodge or shield herself, only stared deeply into Jirou's eyes. The sword sliced cleanly into her neck and through her flesh and through her bone and came out effortlessly on the other side, simply allowing it to happen. She stood for a moment, tiny twitches of her fingers from her hands down at her sides, still an ephemeral spark of life in her eyes as blood ran down in flowing red sheets around her neck and then--in the passing of that moment--her body dropped unceremoniously to the ground and her severed head fell after it and everything that Anima, daughter of the sorceress
Khorvayne and the incubus she had summoned and let shrivel to death upon
Arethil, came spilling out in pulsating waves from her neck. A spurt of blood and there the innocent girl whom Kylesia had tried to save in
Elbion; a spurt of blood and there that same girl giving in at long last to her Mother's wishes and the dark nestled within her heart and committing her first murder; a spurt of blood and there the woman fleeing across the span of the world in abject horror of the Great Divine who Watched her; a spurt of blood and there the woman who had become the Amalgamation with Mother's help and came so close to transcendent bliss.
The heart that had beat intimately with Jirou's own slowed. Stopped. Her head lay on the floor and tiny crackles of dark sorcery rippled intermittently around her jaw and her chin and her brow and Hannah's face--a thin mask of flesh--slid off of Anima's own. Her hair turned black and her eyes gray and her skin some few tones darker and the shape of her skull adjusted: the Masquerade had ended.
Stillness. Her body did not move, and the blood pulsing from her neck ceased and the pool on the floor reached its extent. Her eyes remained open, frozen forward, as if still staring at Jirou even if they were truly oriented to the floor and the wall.
There were many forms of intimacy. Weren't there.
There was a boy once. Named Jirou. A boy who had never killed anyone, good or evil--much like Anima.
And that boy was dead. Dead long before he had come here.
Yet the last piece of conscious awareness: the taste of cherries.
A love, sincerely felt, that Anima had helped further him along on his path toward the dark. That she was now a permanent scar on his soul. He would carry her with him, as she had carried others.
A delightful.
Embracing.
Jirou
