She makes her peace with what happened as best she can.
It is hard, because she sees the children dying in her nightmares. The Baltian boy and the Stratosian girl meet their demise over and over again when she closes her eyes and falls into sleep. She couldn’t stop what happened. None of them could. Their deaths had been just a short thread of a tapestry woven long ago, cloaking what could have been into darkness instead.
The nightmares she has are far richer than the life she now leads while awake.
Everything is blurry now: the days pass like a single heartbeat, the weeks come and go like one breath into the next. It all happens too fast and just outside of her. Like she is an observer instead of a participant in her own life. Guilt makes tears prick at the corners of her eyes and makes everything messier, harder to see clearly. When she does have moments of lucidity, Glaw finds herself drawn back to the place where everything started.
She goes to the Ruins, and when she leaves, the cycle starts all over again.
Her dainty feet press their path into the desolate dirt. It has become her own well-worn trail into the land that she follows now, under the cover of night. The moon is fat and low above her, at least, making it easier to pick through the rubble as it illuminates her way forward. She was always a slight thing, even before the sprites whisked her away, but now she is even more so. Her tail curls tightly, and at the end, a pale banner of hair seems to wave against the dark. Even the spiraling horn atop her forehead is a delicate piece. Her mother might have even called her beautiful now if it weren’t for her twisted, ugly mouth.
Glaw sees her destination just ahead and quickens her pace. It is where it all happened so many lifetimes ago. She bows her head and closes her eyes. The memories come again, and with them, a tear starts to slide down her cheek. Why had she thought she could help when she was the most useless of them all? Someone more capable might have stopped what had happened, might have done better. Who was she to think that she could save the world when she couldn’t even save herself?
glaw