Chapter Text
For the first apology, she went to the deepest depths of the sea.
There, amidst swirling bubbles and tar-thick sediment, amidst strange flashing creatures and bodies warped and strange, she plucked a stone from the very bottommost cavernous chasms of the ocean. It was dark, simple, polished smooth by grinding sand and crushing pressure, and it carried with it all the weight of aeons passing by beyond light or touch, of the sheer density of being held beneath every point of the rolling waves.
She cleaned the mud from it and wound it into the strands of a necklace, which she hung around her beloved's neck and said, For the depth of my guilt.
For the second apology, she went to the blazing gulf of space, where she flickered through the stars like the figment of imagination that she was. She let the ravening clutch of a black hole draw her in, let it eat away at all that she was as she pulled silken ribbons of darkest night and purest gravity from that all-encompassing destruction and curled them firmly in her grasp.
She wove the ribbons into an abyssal coronet, and she laid it atop her beloved's midnight-blue hair, saying, For the weight of my crimes.
For the third apology, she went to all the flowers and fields of the world; every meadow, every hidden glade, every place where a blossom might lift its dainty head. She cupped her hands under the delicate blooms and spun their pollen into nectar and their nectar into honey, drawing the sweetness out like venom as she spun the strands of worldly possibility.
And she went to every tree, every stump, every branch where axe or saw or blade might fall, and she coaxed out the sickly welling of sap from the wounded wood and kept that, too. She mixed the two potions together and formed a perfume, sweet as sugar, sharp as splinters.
She bottled the perfume in a glass of crystallized time-fragments and went to her love, anointing her with it and saying, For the blood I have spilled.
And she groveled for her apologies to be accepted, and Bernkastel –lovely and cruel Bernkastel, with a smile like the sharp curve of the moon and eyes like the truth in wine– deigned to perhaps forgive her, after another thousand years had passed.
And Lambdadelta had laughed, and laughed, and laughed, as though she were still the mischievous child whose mind had birthed her.
For she was the Witch of Certainty, and soon meant the same as now.