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The stab comes out of nowhere. Literally. She'd smile wryly at her own joke if she had the willpower, but most of her body is too busy reacting to the gaping hole in her stomach. As she falls towards the checkered piece of land, she watches the smug smirk on the muzzle of the creature who cut her open, his blade coated now in both the blood of the Heir and the Seer. The bastard killed John, had made her as good as dead, and she was furious. Rose establishes quickly that her lungs are still intact, and draws a deep breath. Then she screams, pure unadulterated fury and rage not quite covering the drowning sorrow of a life cut short.
Black tendrils weave around her as she screams on and on, automatically slowing her fall to protect her. Were she not occupied with her throat-tearing howling, she would laugh at their futile efforts. As she lands almost gently on the floating platform of earth, and the tendrils disappear from her vision, her heartbroken wail dissolves into choking sobbing. With each gasp of breath, her chest shuddered, sending another burning needle of pain through her body. Jack failed to pierce anything important, she thinks with a strange kind of detachment, he doomed me to a slow and painful death. Alone.
Unable to hold her head up any longer, it lolls to the side, and she sees John's body lying near her, arms outstretched awkwardly. Her friend still manages to be adorably dorky, even in death. She tries to focus on him, but she can feel her mind clouding, from pain or the approaching inevitability. He wanted to marry me, comes an unbidden thought from the back of her mind, perhaps he had not sufficiently thought it through, and it had been suggested by an angry little troll from another universe, but the gesture was appreciated. Rose can feel her sash and dress are soaked with warm blood, and her heart is barely pumping out a beat now, breathing has become a chore, but she forces herself to focus elsewhere. Imagine a relationship with John, she tells herself, but her brain, ever rebellious, thinks of endearing jade-coloured text. Her eyes fill with tears. She's never going to meet Kanaya. Her trollian window went as black as her magic, and now she is lying here on a platform in a devastated battlefield, and she was never able to say her farewells, or express her feelings. She's never going to see Kanaya. She's never going to see her brother again either.
Salty tears begin dripping onto the ground beneath her. Rose is somehow glad that her mother's body isn't with her now. That the last memory her mother would have had of her was one of a fighting child. A girl full of life and intelligence and spirit, who had never met an eldritch abomination in her short life. she thinks of all they set out to accomplish, and how they have failed along the way. She's fighting to keep her mind clear as long as she can, and separate it from the burning, stabbing pain she feels. The rush of adrenaline is helping, but the wound goes straight through her and there's only so much a blood chemical can do when there's not much blood left. She regards the still body of her friend, and feels a rush of affection for the dork. I'm sorry, John, I could never have been your wife, she whispers in her mind, and thinks of Kanaya again. The thought brings a faint smile to her face, but perhaps I could have been your moirail. Rose slowly, weakly, stretches out a hand towards John's as the darkness that has been threatening her vision closes in.
From a distance, Jack watches as a dark, delicate hand falls limp just inches from its target.
