La paura del buio

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

To persevere in madness

GRISHAVERSE 

Dark!Alina

COW-T#12, w4, m2: Errare humanum est, perseverare autem diabolicum

610 words

In the end, when the hands of both of them are soaked in blood, Alina wonders if she was ever in the right.  

It’s a matter of perspective, of course. 

A Saint, the Soldat Sol called her as they died for her, the last beacon of hope, sent to Ravka to save them all. An ungrateful child, whispered the oprichniki and yelled the Grishas under the Darkling command, too naive to look past her own selfishness, too weak to make a few sacrifices. 

And yet, in the end, sacrifices had to be made. 

She tells herself - as she told herself the first time she went to war - that it’s the reason that matters, that what makes her different from the Darkling is that she’s doing it to save people. But the thing is, as Ivan told her, the Darkling is doing the same. 

A war to stop all wars, if such a thing was even possible - a few kills to avoid massacre after massacre. When this started, it looked too high a price to pay: a few thousands lives just to prove a point. Now, as she tries to keep up with the corpses and loses count of the deaths that surround her, she wonders if it wouldn’t have been better - kinder - to let him have his way. 

But she knows she wouldn’t have - no, she would have fought him even if she had seen his point, she would have snatched the power of the collar back and she would have ran away across the Fold even if he had somehow managed to convince her. 

Because he was about to kill Mal. 

Don’t trust the right thing done for the wrong reason, had told her Baghra once, in the Spinning Wheel, when she had still tried to train her, it’s not better than the wrong thing done for the right reason, you should have already learned that. She thought she was talking about the Darkling - and maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t this enlightened wise woman who always knew everything - but now she knows it was about her. 

She knows the only reason they are here, fighting against each other, is because the Darkling, master manipulator that he always had been, had made a mistake. He had the perfect leverage and he had thrown it away. It’s almost funny, ironic, he had been plotting for centuries, and his undoing was his heart and the incapability of waiting a few decades to have her. 

It’s too late now, too late for changing the course of history - she sees the fervor of her acolytes, the glowing flame of madness burning in their eyes; she sees the despair in her war council every time she sits with them, with her Grisha council and Mal, the Apparat and the Soldat Sol’s new general, with Nikolai’s look-a-like, a puppet king that is keeping at bay the desperation of telling the people they were bound to protect that not even their own king was safe from the Darkling curses; she sees everything that will happen, unfolding in front of her in a predestined route and she knows there’s no way to stray. This is a war that can’t be won, the Darkling and her are two faces of the same coin, too balanced, their powers too even, their forces and their allies countering each other. 

But even knowing so, she keeps committing the same mistakes, again and again, and she doesn’t know how to stop. 

Because to stop, she’ll have to kill Mal, and she can’t. She won’t.