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daughterhood
Her grandfather has high expectations.
It’s unsurprising. Her mother had always told her that he was stern faced and cold hearted – she came here for that.
Her mom was kind. Loving. Careful. Her mom was rotting under the sand in Shurima.
Ambessa is made of stronger stuff. She is. She needs to be.
He sizes her up, careful in his inspection. “You have Meva’s eyes.”
She’s startled, for a second. His expression is severe.
“Thank you?” She says, turning up into a question on accident. She clears her throat. “Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
She stiffens her back. Straightens her shoulders. It was, but she can’t say that. Can’t say that she loved her mother, and she missed her, and there’s an empty space in her heart that she can’t think around.
Can’t say any of that. Have to keep going. She looks into her eyes – they don’t look like her mom’s. They’re cut-glass grey, glinting like steel.
“Come.” He tells her, imperiously. She follows, slipping away from the attendants who’d brought her to him.
Nobody had believed that she was Menelik’s granddaughter. Noone had believed she was a Medarda – not until she showed them the heavy, red ring, and another man pointed at her called her his daughter. Her mother had told her, in those final moments, to find the jewelry and a photograph. To take them.
She hasn’t taken either off since. The ring’s too big, but she knows she’ll lose it if anyone else can see it. Her clothes have gone from white to brown, pasted to her legs. The photograph is folded and tied to her chest.
They give her mobility. She follows.
They go down. Down and down and down. The smooth stone of the walls fades into jagged stones, packed together with cement. She steps into a puddle.
“Carefu – “ He says, aborted. There is a sharp sting to it, a press of tension that Ambessa’s never heard before.
She needs to be. Her feet are still bare, and the water hides sharp stone. She makes sure she doesn’t flinch, when she lands on one of them.
Her foot comes out bloody. He doesn’t comment on it.
“Keep your back up, and your shoulders straight. You are a Medarda. Look the part.” He doesn’t turn to tell her, but he can tell that she’s trying to slip into his shadow.
She tries. To look the part. She copies him, mostly. Tries to look both calm and relaxed but also strong and severe. To move through the room with nothing to prove. She succeeds, mostly.
Probably.
Hopefully.
The next room is louder.
There are people chained to the walls with wild eyes. She makes eye contact with one of them, and just –
There’s blue sown into her hair. Like her’s.
She doesn’t comment on it and pulls closer to Menelik. He stops in the next room, surveying another cell.
A larger one. There’s a man chained to the floor, draped in white and blue and teal. His head is set against a wooden block.
There’s an axe, is another man’s hands. Rippling little cloud designs set into them. The handle of it is a bright, lurid red.
She looks back to the man – to her grandfather – except he’s looking clear-eyed at the Shuriman man. He doesn’t meet her gaze. She looks back at his neck.
He’s huge. Tanned skin. His eyes meet her’s.
He knows as well as she does that there’s nothing she can do about it, even if she wanted to. She knows that she can’t possibly look away. She’s chosen a new life, and that means new things. Like this.
There’s a quiet swish of the axe, and a loud cry, and then the noise of meat. Of steel meeting muscle and sinew and bone, cleaving one from two. It hits the wood block with a thunk, spiderweb cracks ripping across its surface.
There is a very particular moment, where he goes from seeing her, to empty. She can see it. And then his head falls against the floor, red spilling into a drain set on the floor.
She can see a circular tube, where he would’ve drawn breath. Blood slips over it, one particular bit of meat squeezing out a glob.
The axe is lifted, again, roughly, and time starts again. The man looks like him – like her grandfather, not the corpse – but the grin doesn’t.
“Odd to see you down here. What’s with the whelp?”
“I have a task for you – for the house. And this is Meva’s daughter.” And he blinks, looking back down at her, face a little tilted. She keeps her back up.
“I didn’t think she’d ever come home.”
“She didn’t. Dead in Shurima. I imagine she gave this one a path to Noxus – likely, the one she took out of here. I need a room prepared for her in my house.”
And he laughs, a little quarter snort. “I’m sure Ralan would be happy to take her in, if you asked him to.”
“He has his own children to take care of.”
He arches one eyebrow, sharing a smile with her, like they were supposed to be laughing at him. “Yes, he does.”
“If he has any concerns, that’s his to take up. Unless you disagree, Vallius?”
“Oh no, I couldn’t possibly. I just imagine he will, with great abandon.” He cleans his axe, one pass with a brown cloth taking most of the blood.
He swings it over his shoulder like it weighs nothing at all and waits for one long pressing second. Her grandfather jerks his chin, and he slips out of the room, quiet even though he’s got all that muscle.
“What is your name?” He asks her, and for a second she forgets that she’s supposed to respond.
“Ambessa.”
“Ambessa Medarda.” He corrects. “Go after him.”
She can hear his footsteps, but he’s gotten far ahead of her. She breaks into a run.
motherhood
Ambessa Medarda does not shy away from the battlefield. She does not shy away from death. She’s not an outsider, not anymore, but status does not come to her easily, and she cannot afford to choose against showing her capability. Even when it’s a trap.
Death visits her when she’s with child. Her husband would call it poetic. She would call it almost-devasting.
Almost.
She stands, next to Lamb, a Wolf totem in its hands. She stares at the crystalline blueness of it.
“Take this.” Lamb offers her, the black mask turned blue in the faint light, “And you and I shall never meet again.”
It has her mother’s voice. Her muzzle does not move.
There is, on the back of her neck, the faint feeling of long hungry breaths. The wolf is still upright, she knows. Still hunting her.
Deeper, she can feels the pulse of pressure against her stomach. When she looks down, there’s nothing – but she can feel it, squeezing something.
This is no real choice. There is no universe where Ambessa does anything but take it.
She feels the blue burn out of her – feels power, and wrath, and life! Life for her and for her child! They move in her stomach, and she wonders if the blue is being burnt out of them, too.
Good. Good! The world is harsh, and rough, and terrible. The world will demand blood and sweat and tears. And her child? They should know how to fight.
She will teach them to win.
As her soul burns, she focuses on that fact. That she can teach them to win. That she has won. She has conquered death, and now all that rings through her is the aftermath of her success.
The pain tastes like power. It tastes like victory. The totem enters her flesh – she can feel it flowing through her bloodstream.
Ambessa has always been good with pain. It has always brought her back to herself. She lets herself sink into it, focus on the curse of sensation ringing through her body. Lets her grief and resentment and tragedy sink into the sand with her Lamb. Visions of power dot her sight – visions of her hair grayed and her weapons sharp and a throne, set and waiting for her.
And then her child kicks, and she comes back to herself.
It’s the only thing that doesn’t light her up with pain or grandness. It’s pressure, simple. It is a faint warmth.
She reaches for it, and wakes to a lesser pain. Removes the arrow. Stumbles. Survives.
The both of them have. She can feel it – the child still moves, still kicks. Still lives. She keeps one hand on them, another on her spear, and limps to go look for a ship.
She needs to get home.