Chapter Text
Because she takes her job seriously, Rio often takes a moment to honor the soon-to-be dead before collecting their souls, peeking into their past to see what kind of person they may have been. She thinks of herself, in these moments, as a witness. Soon enough the bereaved will get their grubby little subjective paws all over the newly-dead person’s life and start to change it from who they were in life into who they are in memory. Or, of course, there are no mourners and the dead person’s memory slips away with nobody to preserve it.
Not that the distinction between “alive” and “a memory” is so distinct. But death is often the moment when the fact of a person’s existence stops mattering as much as what other people think about it.
Assuming her position before the young woman whose imminent death via exposure in the forests around Salem has summoned her here, Rio closes her eyes and casts her mind back.
All she has time for in these circumstances is the briefest glimpse of a person’s life: a child running, a teenager smirking, a determined young witch trying out new spells, sulking as her mother yells at her, brimming with fury and resentment, a young woman - ah. Rio jerks back as though stung. She should be dead, surely, she had believed she was about to die, but Rio had felt nothing - the girl had been in no danger. Instead, she had absorbed her attackers’ power. Rio replays the moment, watching for the moment the girl realizes she is not dying.
It takes her a minute to realize what’s happening: Rio has become invested. She wants to see how she will prove her mother wrong. She wants to know what she will do with her power. She wants her to feel that heady glee again, that feeling that Rio knows is like cresting a wave.
She regards the girl for a moment. The protection spell she has cast is competent, except - there. She’s missing a bit of a rune that would protect her from the elements. Perhaps because, when she settled down to sleep, her blood was running high and she wasn’t feeling the cold; perhaps because she had to steal scraps of knowledge from poorly-copied books instead of having a proper teacher. Rio shakes her head. Speculating as to why people make the decisions they do is far outside her remit. She reaches out and, with a single finger, corrects the form of the rune. The girl sighs and turns over.
Should she feel guilty over this dereliction of duty? The girl will be hers soon enough. The woods she has found herself in are not particularly safe. She will come to Rio sooner or later.
She leaves a flower as a token: another unprecedented departure from procedure.