Vadh
The silence has edges where her sounds used to be.
In the lower hall, I lower myself for the pour. The venom drips from my palms.
Clouded. Amber at the edges.
One night without her body in the building and my venom has reverted. The channels accept the weak flow as they always have. The seal stabilizes. The world is safer today than it was yesterday. Only because she left.
The moss outside my sleeping chamber is still green. It will die back without her.
Her pack is gone. Her boots. The bedroll is still here. She left it.
The drawings are on the ledge.
She left them. Every sheet except the channel drawing and the fragment.
I unroll the first sheet. The east corridor, drawn in her clean precise hand. Every channel marked. Every junction labeled in the notation she inherited from Reka and made her own.
The second sheet. The lower levels. The carvings she sketched by lamplight. The priestesses. The Naga. The paired grooves.
The third sheet. The decay map. My resting spot in the main hall marked with a pale circle. Her sleeping spot marked with green. The two patterns she pieced together over days, never announcing what she was building.
The fourth sheet.
I hold it to the corridor light.
It is me. Charcoal on paper. My face in profile, looking toward the supply room entrance.
The angle of my jaw. The ridge of scales above my brow.
The line of my throat descending into the collar of the armor.
She drew the armor loose at the shoulder where the buckle has always been loose.
She drew the seam at my wrist where the scales change grain.
She drew my hands. Both of them. Open. The detail in the scales of my palms is finer than anything in the building drawings.
She spent time on my hands. She sat in the corridor at night and drew the creases of my palms from memory and she got them right.
The place where Bryn put her thumb and my venom spiked and the stone did not die.
The bottom of the page. A second sketch, smaller. My coils in the main hall, seen from above. The way they arrange when I am resting. The loops stacked, the tip curled in. She drew this from the corridor entrance. She was standing in the doorway watching me and I did not know.
The private drawing. The one she turned face-down when I came around the corner. The one she said was private.
She drew me.
I roll the sheets. I hold the roll against my chest. The venom under my scales responds. The glands along my forearms firing as they did when she pressed her thumb into my palm. My body producing for a woman who is not in the building.
I put the drawings on the shelf in my sleeping chamber, beside my mother’s armor. The gold pauldron she wore, the chest piece with the scale pattern worked into the metal. My father’s gold is the set I wear. Hers stayed here. Her things on one side of the shelf. Bryn’s maps on the other.
I coil on the stone. The corridor outside my door is empty. No pack strap. No breathing through the stone.
I say the word again. To the corridor and the empty stone and the green that is already dying on the wall. The sound fills the dark and comes back to me from every surface and there is no one to hear it.
In the dark, the tip of my tail uncurls from the loop and reaches along the corridor floor. Toward the space where she slept against my coils. The stone is bare. The tail rests there for a moment, against nothing, in the space she used to fill.
I pull it back.