Chapter Text
“There are days you will feel in your bones.
You will wake to find that night carried itself
into the morning without warning, asking you
to hold a little more than you had bargained for.”
– Brianna Pastor
---
She had known better; she had seen it. Breaking a bond meant to sustain life was no easy feat to begin with, but breaking one entangled in unnamed feelings that craved a guttural connection was a whole different challenge. Had she spoken it out loud, had they been willing to name it, perhaps then a clear severance, a clean cut, would have been possible.
It was possibility that enamoured them, however. A distinct flavour of it that had their magic simmering, dancing in between the cracks of the voices that sang their connection in the battlefield. It had been a choice; a mutual unspoken choice made out of something undeniable – and their magic heard them; it heard them and responded with a clarity that they did not yet consciously possess themselves.
There was no way out of it now, but there was a way in, if willing.
---
The nightmares, the memories, she could live with. Not without scaring, but they were in the realm of the understandable. They had a shape, a form, something recognisable about them that allowed her to breathe through.
The emptiness though, the feeling of having a black hole somewhere deep inside her, now that took her breath away.
No matter how hard she tried to distract herself from it, to break it down into comprehensible pieces, it was as if this void called to her whole being, her mind, soul and body – a siren, demanding her full attention and energy. See me, it wailed, please.
The ache was on the verge of unbearable. Always on the verge of consuming her, but at the same time denying the promised obliteration that she was now more than ready to claim.
Had it been weeks or months since the procedure? She could no longer tell. It was as if time had collapsed on itself and left her to roam the ruins of its existence until her own came into question – and she was questioning, but the hold would still not yield.
Sleep evaded her. Instead of the promised daze of exhaustion though, she was plagued with something else, something sharp and cutting. Her awareness was in a hyper state, augmented. How was she to unlock this? The key was missing, the self was missing.
When the ache had first announced itself, a gentle tug at the time, she had named it grieving. She had been told to expect it, so she sat with it, offered time and understanding, trying to slowly untangle herself from it. The loss did not feel like that of a child, though, nor of a mother. Instead, it felt like the loss of life itself, of living.
She thought of reaching out to Izadora. Her remedy for the memories had not stopped them, but it had slowed them down, made them more manageable. How was she to describe this, though? How was she to convey her own unravelling that seemed to pull inward instead of outward?
The thought of linking with the Necro scientist had briefly crossed her mind, but it had been quickly overtaken by an acidic sense of repulsion, of possession, that had her stumbling.
As its tendrils grew, as they claimed her, she gave up on fighting. Instead, she went on, surviving each day, finding respite in tiring her muscles to the point of breaking, tempting her body to shut down. While it never did, the physical pain overshadowed the ache – only for the briefest of moments, but it afforded her a deep, clear breath before releasing her to the bottomless pit of her being.
She was there now. In the last moments of the clear inhale, stretching it as far as she could before the autopilot of self-preservation kicked in.
She was lying on the floor an old, empty training room that held her now regular extracurricular physical sessions. She had come across it during one of her midnight walks – that had been her first strategy, walking until she lost herself completely. Again, always on the verge, but her feet inevitably guided her back to the dorms until one day they didn’t.
The presence of magic in this room had been more concentrated than common, and it seemed to call to her in welcome. It felt sentient, knowing, which in turn made her feel less alone.
The humming, though, the humming she could now feel on her skin as her lungs started to burn, that was new. For a moment she thought that perhaps she had finally gone too far, pushed too hard, and that the peace she had been eagerly seeking would be landing on her as the cloak of death.
Had the air not become electrifying, she would have carried the journey of that train of thought into wreckage. There was also a tingling, though, a new yet familiar magic signature in the room, cautiously yet deliberately reaching for her own.
“Craven?”