Chenzhou's hands were gentle as they unwound the outer layer of bandages around her shoulders. Eirian sat up to give him room to work around her shoulders. Mingzhe lit a candle from the night table. The warm glow didn't do much to illuminate teh room, but it was enough to let the three of them see one another. Eirian wrapped her arms around her knees in the middle of the bed and rested her head on them as Chenzhou carefully peeled away the bandages. The skin had regrown into them in several places, and the new skin tore as the bandages pulled free. Compared to everything else she'd experienced over the last month, it felt more like a tickle than actual pain.
"I don't see any blood." Mingzhe carefully held the candle over her.
"It's just new skin," Chenzhou agreed, tossing the bandages to the floor. "It's still growing, so it shouldn't be an issue. It didn't take much off anyway."
Eirian hummed and flexed her shoulders to try to stretch out the itch of new skin. She'd take the pain over an itch she couldn't reach any day. Did that make her strange she wondered as Chenzhou and Mingzhe pulled away more of the bandages. She imagined many people would take a short period of pain, no matter how bad, over a long annoyance with no relief.
Rock's sake, she'd take long-term pain over the annoyance of most lengths, so maybe that made her different. But an itch would drive her insane, and pain was just something you had to live with sometimes. There were people who spent every day of their lives in pain and still managed to have successful lives. For some reason, pain was easier to become accustomed to than annoyance.
It took her several minutes to realize that Chenzhou and Mingzhe had gone silent, and there was no more pulling or pain. She raised her head and carefully looked over her shoulder. "What's wrong?"
Chenzhou's eyes were locked on her back, wide and shocked.
She twisted around and looked at Mingzhe, but he wore the same expression.
How similar these two were at times, and yet they'd struggled to get along for so long.
"Okay, what is it?" She tried to crane her neck around, but there was no way she was going to be able to see what they were looking at.
It was the mark, obviously. She'd felt it growing along with her skin. Not exactly painful and not annoying like an itch, but just strange. Like there was something living under her skin, similarly to her magic. She really only noticed it when it was moving, growing, spreading. Not like poison, but not like joy either.
Just something that wasn't from her but was now a part of her.
"It's…" Mingzhe trailed off, unsure how to describe what he was seeing.
Chenzhou opened his mouth but shut it again before anything came out.
The mark spanned almost the entirety of Eirian's upper back. In a slurry of vivid colors that would be impossible to match with any manmade ink. Its edges peaked over her shoulders and around her sides and crept down her spine as far down as halfway down her back.
At first look, it was just a mass of color, overwhelming in its intensity, but the longer they stared at it, the more the image became clear.
The images.
They started on her left shoulder, and Chenzhou recognized the outline of Aontacht surrounded by the Still Water and the winding road through the mountains to the Camelia. The first half of the Camelia was in darker colors, surrounded by dark clouds that represented the miasma that had choked it for so long, but the image shifted halfway through the very detailed and accurate rendition to something brighter, flooded with gleaming black and bright, blood red and golden sunlight. It looked like the place Chenzhou had read about in his ancestor's records, but had never seen himself. Even now, the Camelia's flowers hadn't bloomed again yet. Greenery had returned, moss climbing up from the waters below and tufts of long grass, about the only thing hardy enough to survive all four seasons on volcanic rock.
But the bright red flowers that have given the estate its name had yet to appear. People were watching for them, though. Henri had been explicit about how much hope people were putting in their return.
After the Camelia swirls of colors became the borderlands, a vicious battle, and then a fire that seemed to consume the whole world. At the center of the fire was a female figure, too small for any real detail, but there wasn't really anyone else it could be, was there?
After the fire, there was a small blank space that looked like color was bleeding into, but not enough to tell what it was supposed to be.
There were other, smaller depictions between the larger ones, small figures fighting, places neither Chenzhou nor Mingzhe recognized, and items whose importance they didn't understand, but looking at the entire picture, it was clear it must have meant something to Eirian.
"It's your life." Mingzhe breathed in wonder.
A tear slid down Chenzhou's cheek as he leaned forward and pressed his lips to the Camelia drawn on her skin.
~ tbc