ECDYSIS | Disconnection

[Mescaffier 6197]

 

Spoiler

 

 

Неужели он нашел в ней Бога?

Он так чувствовал свою свободу

Рядом с Богом тогда все можно

 

Когда Бог твой ложный

[ PROPHECY - In Vehementia, Oborior ]

 

Viktoriya retched first, black bile and clotted phlegm streaking the stone beneath her cheek. Her spine arched hard enough to creak, muscles seizing in panicked knots as something unseen began to tear loose from her core. For a heartbeat - no, many of them - she was convinced her chest had been caved in, that her ribs were split wide and her own skeleton was crawling its way free. At the back of her skull, her mind itself burned away.

 

Pain arrived late and vicious, a spreading frost-fire that ate at whatever nerves she'd had left, a husk withered and forgotten to time, which at this point had survived only off the bugs and vermin the maleficar could scrounge. Her veins felt hollowed, completely scraped raw of something thick and crawling that had now been sucked clean. Her rotten, blackened heart - where that horrible corruption had nested for so long, for centuries, felt as though it'd suddenly ceased to be. A fire both bright as the sun and dark as the abyss tore at her flesh, swallowing a figure before her whose words her ears refused to hear.

 

A cloying darkness overtook her vision as the feeling in her limbs went. Her eyes closed. She had been a menace on the streets of Helena, once at the pinnacle of soul-weaving and then a gravelord amongst her fellow flesh-weavers. At last, this was it? Not in battle, nor betrayal, or even by her own hand. 

 

 Death?

 

. . .

. . .

. . .

 

She gasped, finally, a raw and ugly sound. Air scorched her lungs, and the smell of the room then hit her - iron, damp stone, sweet ash. She rolled onto her side, nails scraping uselessly against the stone. Dripping water, wind slipping through the ruined architecture. The growl of her stomach.

. . .

. . .

. . .

 

Life.

 

Her eyes slowly opened. Where was she? Who was she? Eventually, she pushed herself upright in a movement that was clumsy, graceless. A hand went to push her hair back, to no avail - it was matted and tangled into one, great blob. When she finally rose, the first thing she did was shave her head bald with the dagger she awoke with. Staring at her bruised and battered face in the puddle of murky water, she'd hoped to glean something about herself. But no names surfaced, nor cities or friends to recall. She was tall - taller than most, she sensed dimly - and the skin of her only arm was scarred enough to feel like sandpaper. Had she been a warrior? Perhaps a manual laborer? No, she was too weak for that.

 

Somewhere far below the surface of her being, something old and beastial had been severed, against all odds, a once impossible feat. No longer sleeping or waiting, but gone. Entirely. In its place was an unclaimed quiet, vast and unsettling, like a field razed by fire. She turned toward the light leaking in through a fractured wall, drawn by nothing more sophisticated than curiosity to what might lay outside. Ahead laid a world that did not know her, and for the first time in her life, neither did she.

From digging in her pockets, she found two letters. It seemed she'd been in the process of writing, before ... whatever had occurred, occurred. The two beaten slips of parchment would soon find their recipients, written in hardly legible Elven with even worse handwriting. @mika1278 @Lapidary

 

Spoiler

she is bald for her crimes mashallah