Sep 01, 2007 21:26
Massive swarms of people, toiling, roiling around like the fire ants that nipped her heels, swarmed her stomach, tried to force into her mouth as the sea of them flooded over her helplessness. Those insects, so many of them yet so small, roared, as those people on the lawn roared with their chatter. Adah felt like she'd never seen so many people...so many people so pale, anyway...in a long time, and the way they scattered in front of the school just swept her up in too much recognition. Noiting ocer hcum oot nipu. She couldn't handle it. She had to leave.
Adah did what she always did. She found wilderness, made it her own, although the tame temperate preserve on this island held little of the dense danger of the heart of the jungle. Still, the walk had been nice. The walk had been without all those people, and she even thought she saw a small flash of a woodland creature unlike anything but amphibians in the Congo. Reed laet. She tried to find more, but they seemed to escape her every time.
Only one suitcase clutched in Adah's hand when she cleared the threshold of her new bedroom, but she'd been clutching it all day. She hadn't done so much walking in a very long time and it left her...well, it left her back against the wall, her suitcase thunking down below her and threatening to spill out its contents as she nearly spilled onto the floor. She let out a gasp; her right leg was being seized with sharp tremors of pain from all the effort of the day, made even worse from those awful, awful stairs. She couldn't even remember the last time she'd had to deal with stairs. Closing her eyes tightly, she refused to let out even a whimper of pain after that initial gasp. It'll pass. It always passed. But at least she'd made it here first. She tried to control her breaths, control the unwilling, the uncontrollable. It'll pass, it'll pass...It was only pain of the body.
The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.
[[ mmmm, open. ]]
ronan,
those stairs will kill adah,
luke,
room 218