She isn’t sure why she has felt more lost than she ever has before.
Her journey to the afterlife had bred more questions than it had answered, and she had left that haunted wasteland feeling restless and perplexed. The weightless halo that glowed above her head felt like it was crushing her; the white and gold feathers of her wings felt like they may as well have been made of lead. And that new golden warmth that flowed in her veins, with a peculiar power she has never felt before, made her feel like a stranger in her own body.
But the physical changes didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the emotional ones.
Going to the afterlife in search of Dhumin felt like it had yanked her back into the past. She remembers when he had first disappeared how it taken her months to stop searching for him, to stop thinking every flash of pale skin was him. She remembers the insurmountable guilt she had felt the first time she let Skellig touch her, because it wasn’t him. How she had been so afraid of what she was going to do when Dhumin came back and discovered she had a birthed a child that wasn’t his.
And now all that old guilt, and all those old wounds she had worked to keep covered, felt like they were flayed wide open.
It’s why when she sees Ashhal she feels a sudden rush of shame flush across her. Her heart squeezes anxiously in her chest, because the life that still grew inside of her was his. Maybe Dhumin had noticed when she saw him in the afterlife, and that was why even when the gates had opened he wasn’t here. Because she was a disappointment, she was used, and no matter how angelic her new appearance might be she was still the same worthless thing she had always been on the inside.
“I swear all you do is sleep,” she says once she is close enough, because she never could resist cutting herself on a familiar blade. “Except for when you’re doing that other thing you’re always doing.” The sunlight glistens off the golden tips of her feathers, and that amused simper seems out of place beneath her halo, but the impossible darkness of her eyes are still haunted with all the same ghosts she’s always had as she watches him.
