isolt griffin

I'm more alive than I've ever been

Of course she was aware of the trouble to which she was extending a beckoning hand, the retribution anticipated even as the bitter tinge of the words stung her otherwise amiable tongue. After all, how many times had the stunning levithan before her taken from Isolt the pound of flesh she presumed that she was due? How many latent scars still coiled their knotted ropes about her heart, never to be mended even by the omnipotent elixir of immortality? The redheaded vixen may not have spent as much time as Tetradore had cast in the shade of her Maker's tenebrific shadow, but her imprisonment had been such that she knew, with every part of her, that whether she was to crumble or to rise in the presence of this woman would do little to quail Risque's desire to bring her and Tetradore all the more pain and sorrow.

A sneer hinted at the brims of Isolt's cherry lips and in the crinkling of her petite nose, though the words that stung as a wash of bile upon her tongue did not bear their fruit to her lips. There was not and had never been a day that had transpired since Isolt's untimely death that she was not haunted by the nagging realization that some not-inconsiderable part of Risque would always dwell within her. Blood, after all, was binding.

"Perhaps, if the opportunity presents itself," she quips even before she realizes that the words had drafted themselves in her mind. Had her tongue proffered a moment of pause to her reeling thoughts, the thorns of the thinly-veiled threat would have been swallowed rather than spoken aloud. But there is hardly time for retroactive penance as Risque issues her next largely-rhetorical query. And it is this query that coaxes from Isolt the silence that would surely have served her far better in the moments prior.

A moment of hope sweeps over her as the glacial digits of a chill rattling obscenely up the curve of Isolt's spine; hope that, perhaps, she and Tetradore would once again present their shared nightmare with an ironclad and united front. For there was something that bound them to one another, something far less visceral than the ties of blood shared betwixt the two vampires... but perhaps something every bit as strong. Perhaps, in the promised mayhem that would undoubtedly come, the love that they harbored for one another would prove enough to unite them. Enough to save them. But it is a hope that fizzles out just as readily as it flickers to life; a fool's errand to believe that anything so beautiful might be able to blossom properly in the bleak darkness of Risque's influence.

And Isolt was ever the fool...

She does not turn her head as he passes beside and beyond her, the angelic purity of her blue eyes only rising to meet Tetradore's as he stations himself at the side of his mistress. In this moment Isolt finds herself grasping, clinging desperately to the memories of the man that she knew him to be... the man who had set her free, protected her in his own way, and had come to be one of her dearest friends and greatest loves. The man who had gifted her with the divine warmth of one final sunrise. She clings to these notions in a white-knuckled mental battle against the militia of other memories that threaten at the boundaries of her mind's darkest recesses. The memories of a man who had stood, dead-eyed and apathetic, alongside his mistress as she had drained the life from her.

"Tet," she utters, nearly a whisper, unflinching as she stares into the eyes of the man opposite her, the plea therein undeniable. "Don't."