12-05-2020, 07:02 PM
She keeps trying to see with the eye that's gone dark, keeps trying to squint through ink and blackness and doesn't quite understand the permanent link between the pain and the blindness or that the scent of the blood staining the air with its metallic smell is coming, in part, from her. That it started with her.
She thinks, perhaps, this is still part of the dream, that the black creature before her with the little mouths hiding in his mane is just another monster from the dream, but the pain of her torn skin pings and pings like an alarm that won't shut off, and, slowly, Sintra begins to understand. It's a horrifying realization. She had barely felt being skinned in the dream - at least, it had seemed painful then, but now it is fuzzy like trying to see trees through falling snow. Shredded muscle and tendon and skin remind her that this time, everything is real. The child turns to look at the bloodied corpses as the looming specter speaks.
What has she done for you? I saved you. His words drift over her and she's suffocating, drowning, half the world blank, even as she slowly turns into a rainbow in the growing light of day, a soap bubble with color flickering across its fragile surface.
"But... She's my mom." Her voice is a strident plea between hushed sobs that she tries to swallow again and again, while the remaining violet eye - turned glassy with tears - searches for his strange shape again. Confusion swims in those pools, and she bares her new teeth at him in a rictus of pain. She is a foolish little thing, but even she cannot quite miss the barely-tempered menace in his voice, though filtering it through the haze is an enormous task.
I made them all pay.
All this wreckage. For her.
If she was here, her mother would not have been capable of this, even if her rage and her love for her daughter made her wish that she could. But she isn't here, because Sintra had a nightmare that sent her stumbling into the river, and now she's lost and maimed and at the mercy of a worse sort of predator, something less cowardly than a vulture that would have flown off with his prize as soon as she'd screamed out and tried to climb to her feet. The girl's neck extends, her head so low that her jaw nearly grazes the damp, sandy, soil.
"I-- I'm sorry." she whispers, shivering, "Thank you."
She thinks, perhaps, this is still part of the dream, that the black creature before her with the little mouths hiding in his mane is just another monster from the dream, but the pain of her torn skin pings and pings like an alarm that won't shut off, and, slowly, Sintra begins to understand. It's a horrifying realization. She had barely felt being skinned in the dream - at least, it had seemed painful then, but now it is fuzzy like trying to see trees through falling snow. Shredded muscle and tendon and skin remind her that this time, everything is real. The child turns to look at the bloodied corpses as the looming specter speaks.
What has she done for you? I saved you. His words drift over her and she's suffocating, drowning, half the world blank, even as she slowly turns into a rainbow in the growing light of day, a soap bubble with color flickering across its fragile surface.
"But... She's my mom." Her voice is a strident plea between hushed sobs that she tries to swallow again and again, while the remaining violet eye - turned glassy with tears - searches for his strange shape again. Confusion swims in those pools, and she bares her new teeth at him in a rictus of pain. She is a foolish little thing, but even she cannot quite miss the barely-tempered menace in his voice, though filtering it through the haze is an enormous task.
I made them all pay.
All this wreckage. For her.
If she was here, her mother would not have been capable of this, even if her rage and her love for her daughter made her wish that she could. But she isn't here, because Sintra had a nightmare that sent her stumbling into the river, and now she's lost and maimed and at the mercy of a worse sort of predator, something less cowardly than a vulture that would have flown off with his prize as soon as she'd screamed out and tried to climb to her feet. The girl's neck extends, her head so low that her jaw nearly grazes the damp, sandy, soil.
"I-- I'm sorry." she whispers, shivering, "Thank you."
Sintra
This is the table equivalent of pajamas
@[wilt]