Cerise Sant-Lumiere

There was something wrong with her body.

Cerise knew this on an innate level. It was just the stinging – pain was a basic mechanism to warn the body of harm. But beyond the sensation of skewered and flash frozen skin, she felt something was in her body, worming through her veins and meat and making it wrongly.

Death was entering her. But this was not an unfamiliar occurrence, and by this point, even with the searing pain running across her muscles, the white-hot sensation filling Cerise’s mind was not panic, it was rage.

There wasn’t much time, but enough to act on instinct. She fould feel her fingers beginning to balloon, but they weren’t so swollen that she couldn’t reach into her pockets for the last of the mixtures she had brought with her. She could recall each of the vials comprising her inventory in her mind – hyper compact oil, bottled bad smells, and a few more esoteric tricks and gimmicks.

She didn’t care for precision problem solving. Cerise knew she was on her back, and with what strength she could muster, she rolled around so she could slap the mass of glass in her hand with the ground hard enough to break them all.

Sulfur and grease pooled along her arm and brought the swarm over her face into an agitated frenzy. If Spirits could remember how to sting, they also remembered what it was like to be uncomfortable.

Between the acrid sensations, the heavy rain, and the severe, but weakening cold, it was as if a switch had been flipped. Like a sinuous cloud, the swarm suddenly pried itself off Cerise, and spiraled into the air before dissipating into Breath, their duty done.

For an instant, Cerise lay on her face and let the rain run down her puckered neck. She almost allowed herself the illusion that the crisis was over, before her training kicked in again.

Her insides still felt slimy, and she knew parts of her were filling with blood in the wrong way. Furthermore…

She glanced to the side and saw what had become of Lucretia.

The princess was worse off, being the main target. She lay on her side, the remains of rime melting away in the rain without any further expression of her gift. The woman’s eyes were cloudy and vacant where they could barely be seen through the numerous stings that had punctured her.

Blood poured from her mouth. This mixture of poison wasn’t deciding to wait for a slow, mysterious death. There she was, not even having the strength to make full spasms as she faded away.

Cerise could barely think, herself. The lingering pain and toxins running rampant through her made her lightheaded – perhaps her own spirit was trying to float away?

There was noise in the background – Cerise faintly registered that there was a watching crowd. People shouting to each other to get a doctor or a Guard, or anything; to help; do anything.

Cierse didn’t care. Her fat fingers finally got a grip around a single remaining vial and she twisted the cap off. Half of its green contents went into her mouth, and she managed to swallow the anti-toxin.

Half a dose wasn’t enough. Any doctor knew that – it was little more than a placebo for the desperate. But for now, the sensation of illness receded enough that Cerise could keep focusing on crawling over to the dying princess.

Cerise didn’t have time for niceties, simply grabbing as much of the woman’s face as she could to tilt it upward so she could pour the rest of the anti-toxin into her mouth.

“Come on, idiot, drink it or you’re going to die,” the witch growled. She wasn’t sure if Lucy even had heard, but the swallowing told her that it and all the blood in the princess’s mouth were all going back down her throat and into her stomach.

That bought her a few minutes, and Cerise only hoped that was enough while she reached for the sleeve of Lucretia’s dress and pulled it back to expose her pale arm. It was covered in welts and the veins were nauseatingly dark.

Once upon a time, Cerise hoped to never show her gift more than necessary, but now it was all she had left.

She pushed her power into herself and into the princess simultaneously. Normally it was both insane and impossible to do a two-way diagnosis, but right now she focused on detecting the same wrongness they were both suffering from.

It was easier to feel what was wrong in herself first: The liver and kidneys were swelling; glands were practically going black, overloaded as they were by Black Dog; blood was entering the guts.

Cerise set about molding her insides, and demanded her gift repeat the process in the princess’s body.

Shift fat and membranes about to create physical pockets and sponges. Make the bones create more blood. Create pressure imbalances to force the denser, toxified matter towards the edges of the body. Drain the organs.

Slowly and sure, Cerise could feel the sickness be replaced by exhaustion as her body worked overtime thanks to her gift, which ordered the flesh to work in ways it shouldn’t. It was the sort of ability that turned bones into knives and sinew into ropes. Mortar and putty for the construction of new things, like her depraved ancestors must have once relished in.

For now, all she did was squeeze the poison, forcing it towards a blister of stretching, growing skin that sickeningly wobbled with excess pus and detritus against her neck. She couldn’t put it under her clothes or on her arms, and this was the first alternative she came to.

Not so for the princess, whose own bubble of extracted toxins was pooling towards the back of her forearm.

As the invasive liquids drained away, Lucretia’s cloudy eyes regained lucidity, and the longer it went on, the more they widened in realization.

She watched as Cerise cured her by manipulating all her flesh. It didn’t matter if it was altruistic – she understood that it was a gift, and one that was barely being used to the fullest potential.

The witch was focused on the sack of skin and what she felt in it. If there was any more poison lingering in little Lucy, she couldn’t sense it. They were both drained in multiple senses of the word, and she had to tap into their reserves to fulfill the demand to replace the blood in near an instant, but for now, it seemed the vast majority of the damage had been pulled away.

And pull Cerise did, wrapping her fingers around the bottom of the skin sack and pulling so it broke off – something that was confirmed by Lucretia’s yelp of pain.

Split and bloody skin was nothing compared to escaping death. Cerise grit her teeth to ignore how the skin on her neck tore as she pried her own bag of poison away. With both macabre bags in hand, she hurled them away, letting them split on the slick road to spill their disgusting contents and wash away in the rain.

She no longer felt ill – just a bone deep exhaustion and nausea of a body that had been worked too hard in an instant – and she hoped Lucretia felt the same way, as the witch rolled away to sit in an unseemly manner on her behind, arms splayed behind her to hold her up as she panted.

Lucretia didn’t have the energy to sit with any dignity, either, merely gathering herself under tucked knees trapped in a soggy dress and leaning on her hands as she looked up at her savior.

“You’re a Sant-Lumiere?” She hissed.

“It’s ‘Candlethumb’,” Cerise hoarsely sighed, though she could barely hear herself in the white noise of the rain.

“You’re a Sant-Lumiere…!” Lucretia repeated, with renewed vehemence.

The onlookers had at this point gained enough courage, or perhaps merely enough shame to rush forward and try to help their royalty to her feet, unsteady as she was and practically boneless in their arms as they lifted her up by her arms.

They all looked at Cerise as a man volunteered to haul her up.

“I wish I wasn’t,” She morosely agreed.

Everyone stared bug-eyed at Cerise. Most of them she had never seen in her life, but they all knew the stories, read the history books, and understood the implications.

This was not the princess’s savior – this was a vengeful revenant.

The idea was so instinctual that the crowd around Lucretia took a half-step back before they realized they were trying to demonize a woman who looked ready to fall dead on her feet after saving the princess’s life.

To them, Sant-Lumieres should have had rictus grins and cursed branding irons – all the hallmarks of fairy tale stories. Cerise didn’t match the mold.

But it didn’t stop them from still looking at her with wariness and confusion.

It was inevitable, of course, in Cerise’s opinion. It was only by the grace of higher powers that she had reached her age before she got sussed out. But her work was far from finished.

“I gotta go,” she declared, and pried herself free of the man holding her. Under her own balance, she nearly stumbled, but caught herself in time so she could slowly amble away towards the crowd.

“Where are you going?” Lucretia snarled at Cerise’s departing back, but she couldn’t even lean forward against the support of the people holding her up. “You’re still under arrest… Everything… everything that’s happening…!”

‘It was because of you’, Lucy was trying to say. Cerise didn’t dispute it. Hadn’t it been the prevailing theory that someone wanted to put her on the throne?

“Stay with the crowd. I’m going to find whoever was behind this,” she answered, instead. She even tried to grin back at the pale woman. “Expect a bill after this. Not every day can I say I saved the life of royalty!”

Lucretia blinked for a moment in confusion, before something found an association in her mind, and she screamed at the witch.

“Did you use your gift on my brother when you met him!?”

Cerise kept walking away. “That’s a story for another time.”

“Hey, she said you were under arrest–” a man trying to play a gallant knight growled as he reached out at her.

Cerise was a blur of motion, grabbing the offending limb, before swirling to slam a fist into his chest, where all his ribs met. He wheezed and crumpled to the ground in a heap.

The moment he hit the ground, an audible gasp rippled through the onlookers, and they stepped away nearly in unison from Cerise’s immediate grasp.

Cerise glumly stared at the wall of strangers. “Trust me, leave this to the professionals. The Guards are funded by your taxes, right?”

She walked towards them, and the crowd split in half, daring not to be touched by the survivor of an old, wicked dynasty.

Before long, Cerise joined the throng of the city, having bought a little time and anonymity ahead of a two-layered manhunt: hers, and all that would be after her.