lightbrand

Shining.

Mythra asks, "What's up?" and Nia thinks, bite-faced, the sky, you blighter.

Blighter, indeed. Up in the sky.

It's been over and done with for years, years, years that the Aegis is beautiful, power beyond glory beyond perfection, but that means that the shock she feels day to day, wake to wake, only freshens, never dulls.

It's not about composure, necessarily - it's not about Mythra having that, because she doesn't. Not always. Not in such a way that Nia feels the need to pale, to transfix comparison.

(Well, maybe she does. Maybe that's all part of it, the way she hinges her diligence around steel and abandon all at once. Nearly as deadly as Jin, but bonded to the spectrum of the sky - the sky, the sky, the sky - instead of the pallor of the night. It could be water, if she wanted it to. If water were a stream of photons, and not the other way around.)

It's not envy. Not envy when you've got the proverbial lightning in the bottle, duckmouse in your pocket. Glinting through Nia's fingers is a massless bundle of nausea spinning on her heel one, twice, thrice, and so she's whatever the inverse of envious is.

Not secure, no. Never secure. She's a Flesh Eater; they don't do security. (Coughing doesn't count.)

Smug...maybe. Maybe victorious.

Branded with the soul of life itself. Not the fire, nor the breath. The very essence of exinternalism.

And it lights her up, from her very core.