Her world has always been dark. Black stars, black sun, black moon in a black sky. This should be no different, it is exactly everything she has always known, everything she has always been without. Except that the warmth is gone now too. She cannot feel it when she lifts her face to the sky, cannot feel it in the curve of her spine or the hollows beneath her hips, all the places she knows sunshine loves to pool like warm rainwater.
And she is cold, too.
No more is the soft girl of red and tawny and white. No more are the strands of hair like cornsilk over her hocks and shoulders, or the eyes, sightless as they were, as bright as raw green emeralds buried in pale quartz. No more is the flesh or the muscle, the joints or cartilage. Not even a heart in her chest. They left with the day and they have not come back.
She is an elegant nightmare now. Delicate bones that look impossibly brittle - not white or gray but stained faintly in a way that makes them look like pale rust over ivory, and the soft way they glow makes them no less gruesome. It might be beautiful if it were just empty bones, the echo of life carved out in still white and resting eternally in the ground. But the fact that she stands and moves and turns that delicate skull towards a shapeless dark she cannot see makes it all the more eerie.
She is neither dead nor alive, and it is strange to simply be.
In a land overcome by monsters, she is the creature that goes bump in the night, the worst case scenario that creeps from the stillness of deep shadow. The aura around her has only grown stronger, thicker in the fear she feels and holds so close to an empty chest made silent without a heart to speak for it. She doesn’t know how long she’s been lost, but the absence of Sorren at her side makes her feel more brittle than she can bear.
There is a sound to her left, and the skeleton pauses, turning that blank empty face to stare into oblivion. She cannot see what it is that moves through the forest, cannot see from whose lips those ragged groans fall. There can only be seconds between now and the time they look up and see her, and she has no idea what to do.
They will scream, she’s learned, because they always do now, and it will not help when she tries to gift them a name.
Nightmares are not to be believed.
So she holds her words and her pain and this ache in a chest that will never hold anything but the webs of spiders between long ribs. She holds her fear and her hope and the way they bleed together to leave her covered in bruises that no one else will see. And she waits for those eyes to find her watching, waits for death if this groan belongs to a monster of the dark, waits for anything because this waiting might kill her first.
And then she breaks because this dark has never been so lonely, this fear never so consuming, and her words are small fragile things like stars set free from their moorings. “Hello?” She might be ashamed of the pain in her words if she weren’t already busy being ashamed of her own living horror. “Please don’t scream.” She won’t tell them that she isn’t a monster, because she no longer knows if that’s still true.
And she is cold, too.
No more is the soft girl of red and tawny and white. No more are the strands of hair like cornsilk over her hocks and shoulders, or the eyes, sightless as they were, as bright as raw green emeralds buried in pale quartz. No more is the flesh or the muscle, the joints or cartilage. Not even a heart in her chest. They left with the day and they have not come back.
She is an elegant nightmare now. Delicate bones that look impossibly brittle - not white or gray but stained faintly in a way that makes them look like pale rust over ivory, and the soft way they glow makes them no less gruesome. It might be beautiful if it were just empty bones, the echo of life carved out in still white and resting eternally in the ground. But the fact that she stands and moves and turns that delicate skull towards a shapeless dark she cannot see makes it all the more eerie.
She is neither dead nor alive, and it is strange to simply be.
In a land overcome by monsters, she is the creature that goes bump in the night, the worst case scenario that creeps from the stillness of deep shadow. The aura around her has only grown stronger, thicker in the fear she feels and holds so close to an empty chest made silent without a heart to speak for it. She doesn’t know how long she’s been lost, but the absence of Sorren at her side makes her feel more brittle than she can bear.
There is a sound to her left, and the skeleton pauses, turning that blank empty face to stare into oblivion. She cannot see what it is that moves through the forest, cannot see from whose lips those ragged groans fall. There can only be seconds between now and the time they look up and see her, and she has no idea what to do.
They will scream, she’s learned, because they always do now, and it will not help when she tries to gift them a name.
Nightmares are not to be believed.
So she holds her words and her pain and this ache in a chest that will never hold anything but the webs of spiders between long ribs. She holds her fear and her hope and the way they bleed together to leave her covered in bruises that no one else will see. And she waits for those eyes to find her watching, waits for death if this groan belongs to a monster of the dark, waits for anything because this waiting might kill her first.
And then she breaks because this dark has never been so lonely, this fear never so consuming, and her words are small fragile things like stars set free from their moorings. “Hello?” She might be ashamed of the pain in her words if she weren’t already busy being ashamed of her own living horror. “Please don’t scream.” She won’t tell them that she isn’t a monster, because she no longer knows if that’s still true.