Samodith's second Flight had been even more violent than the first, and worse still, this time she didn't feel any better afterwards.  She had snarled and snapped and bitten and clawed at the suitors she'd demanded, torn them open for answering her call.  And when she finally had chosen, she'd been over-rough with that too, lashing out in some futile attempt to make someone else hurt, because how dare anyone be happy when she was not?  Worse still, she'd been thwarted from bleeding the one she'd most wanted to sink her claws into.  Would she feel any better, if she hadn't been?

She would never know, though she did not precisely regret Araneath.  Had she been in a better emotional state, she'd have appreciated the other green better, but eventually, she sought the highest, most isolated spot she could.  It didn't matter that it was that much colder, not when she seethed hot with bitterness and frustration.  She hardly noticed anything else.  All she wanted was to rip, and tear, and bite, but with no acceptable outlet available to her, all she could do was dull her claws on the rock.  It was deeply unsatisfying, but so was everything else, so what was new?  Nothing was good enough.  No one was good enough.

Not for her.  She was the best there was, and by all rights should be able to have anything and everything she wanted.  Anyone.  They all should have been happy to eat out of her claws, and true, some of them were, but what did those matter?  They didn't know her.  They didn't see her.  She was still just a pretty green.  Feisty.  Sweet if she wanted to be.  They didn't see that she was clever, under it all.  Didn't see how capable she was, or that she was a force to be reckoned with.  At best, if anything, she was special 'for a green.'  Even Skerath, in the end, had chosen a brown.  No one saw.

She'd thought, once, that one had.  Just one.  And that would have been enough.  But she'd Risen twice now, and for all she could tell, he hadn't even noticed.  Would he the third time?  Or the fourth?  Or ever?  It wasn't fair.  Why should someone else get what she wanted?  It stung all the more to make the obvious guess as to why, and to hate it and rage at it.  But she couldn't even do that where anyone would see, couldn't do anything about it.  Because if there were any hearts she couldn't break, it was those.

And oh, how she resented it.  Why should she care?  Why should she be the one who was miserable?  What made her any less deserving?  She knew the answer, of course, and had been turning it over in her mind, obsessing over it and growing steadily more and more spiteful.  But with no one to take it out on, she could only bury it and let it fester into poisoned hearts.  She felt a monster for it, and maybe she was.

If only she could leave, be anywhere but here and never come back.  Go to Western, where Hers would never be cold again.  But there were Turns to wait until that was possible, and by then, what would it even matter?  All that time wasted, hating someone else for being happy, because she couldn't not hate that the one thing she wanted was the one thing she would never have.  Not even the tiniest scrap that she would have settled for (and gladly so, for she had never wanted the exclusive devotion of a one-and-only).  But even that scrap was almost surely out of reach, because even just once was too much to ask.

Just once.