jupiterlicivciv:

reyavie:

The nunnery welcomes her when she is ten. She enters through, abandons royal titles at the door and watches as little women in black keep her close. They are kind (at first). They try to be comprehending but, can you really comprehend what you have never know? When the iron burns her, when her skin looks grey in the moonlight, they lock her away and pray harder, pray louder, pray until they cannot hear her wondering what is wrong with her.

There are moments when Morgan runs her fingers through her skin, around her throat and tightens tightens tightens because nothing else can be as horrible, as damaging as the stone walls which shackle her, that keep her quiet and safe and right. Here. Where they can make of her what they want.

And if they can’t, oh well, she was a good girl, wasn’t she? A bit headstrong, a little stubborn, not a proper girl like her sister. Only then would the image they see match the reality.

Headstrong. (Lifeless). Broken little girl, (if only she had been better).

Those walls teach her to hate. Some days there is so much hatred underneath her skin, Morgan almost frees it, allows it to run through the walls, break the floor, set fire to that odious ceiling (she could, you know? It is right there, whispering in her ears. Let me free, let me free, let me free. But why should it when she is not?) Those walls teach her darkness and fear, they smother her fire and there is nothing else, nothing for her, no one expecting her.

It is when she reaches for Arthur’s letters, for Morgause’s words, for Elaine’s poems. Don’t die, those whisper to her.

(Only she whispers back and the others see. They all see, little witch, and your sentence keeps getting longer and longer).

It is not her fault, she yells at the walls. It is the blood in her veins, the magic in her limbs. It is what her father (and mother) have made of her. (And they always blame the children. They make them, force them into a mold and when they break. Oh.) But no one comes. Eventually, she even stops yelling.

Stops speaking.

Stops.

Morgan is not surprised when one night she stares at the mirror and her hair has gone white. The first thing the world takes from children is their youth, is it not? Curls of snow tresses slide down her skin as she moves, caress her skin as they cover feverish eyes. Her fingers trail down her mirror image, lining every wrinkle she had not felt until then.

The image smiles.

“They cannot kill you,” the lips in the bronze surface move and hers, hers do not. “They can only wait until you do it for them.”

(she thinks she has gone mad, that the words are all in her mind because her lips move not, because her fingers rest on them and they are still and silent!)

“So will you?“ It continues, loud and alive grinning a grin that is all of savage and beautiful and so very unlike hers. “Will you stay here and be what they want you to be? Do you even care to become it? You, who are of us?”

The creature in the mirror extends her a hand and the lovely smile on her face is welcoming. “Come along, cousin. You belong to us.”

Morgan looks around her. She sits in a cell, a four by four little room with stone walls. Her dresses are precisely two and her books have been stolen at the entrance. She has her sister’s letters and her sister’s poems and her brother’s assurances. She has her mother’s denial and a world who does not care to understand her. And she has this. This thing inside her flesh that she did not ask for and is unwelcome and frightening and amazing. It is her too.

“I belong to me,” the little girl finally declares. “I have nothing else.”

The creature (look closely, it is not her. it has thinner eyes and a skin of grey) smiles between sharp teeth and her hand does not waver.

It feels warm.

(In the morrow, they will write to the king. She has fled, they will suggest, she is on her way, she has drowned, she has left. No one will suggest the fae have taken her.

Truth is always the most denied).

——morgan le fay