Broadcast Mind // Backdated!
You are standing in front of a full-length mirror, naked except for the bandages over the stigmata on your torso and around the stump of your left leg. You examine your reflection cooly, eyes drawn back over and over to that jarring gap where a leg should be, like tonguing a missing tooth. One arm is extended elegantly to grasp the frame of the mirror. So that you do not fall over.
You are walking through one of the backstreets of Dismas, hair drawn up into a tail, out of uniform and swordless. A little girl trips into the gutter and scrapes her knee. She has scruffy red hair and plump hands, nothing like you at that age. Her face screws up and her chin wobbles, and instinctively you go to her. Pick her up and dust her off. When you reassure her, she stares up at you with a finger in her mouth and there is no fear in her eyes. This is what you sacrificed for vengeance.
You are gritting your teeth and trying again. Below the ankle your foot is a pulpy red mass with glints of bone. The pain is only a phantom, though, given the way your entire leg has been sliced from your body at the thigh. Closing your eyes and reaching deep within you, you can feel the way your teeth elongate in your mouth, the veins standing up around your face, the bones in your arms grinding, Just a little more. Slowly. Patiently. You find the energy to encourage one tendon to another. Rejoin nerves that scream like metal and fire. Skin merging smoothly into skin. Your hands are slippery with blood - it's all over you. You must have lost a lot, but a quarter wasn't ever really yours to begin with. Breath panting even as you try to keep it even. It's reattaching. It's reattaching! You can feel your foot now, an ugly vivid sensation, but even that injury no longer seems insurmountable.
Then tentacles lash out and with a girlish giggle Riful slices cleanly through all your hard work.
When you pick up your severed leg to try again, it is with the twisted claws of a monster.
You are bracing yourself for impact when the sword slams into you. Irene is relentless, and even though you want to learn, need to be better, stronger, the strongest, your missing arm has unbalanced you, and you haven't managed to compensate for it yet. You try to ignore it as much as possible, try not to think about the future. You saw cripples in Rabona, praying in the temple, begging with bowls and incense, their future a dark and immediate shadow over their head. Irene swings again.
You are so close to Awakening that you can't help it. The whole world has narrowed to the last of your restraint, a desperate inner clenching as you strain for just one more drop of energy, one more moment as a human. Jean's face is long gone from your mind, the mental block of her presence that lasted all the way from Pieta shattered into a million pieces. This is what it feels like, to hold, and breathe, and wait for the sword to fall. Only you have sent no black card. No-one is coming to execute you while you are still a human. And some part of you is grateful. Not because you are holding out the hope that you could cone back from this, for there is no room in your head for hope. Just grinding pain, your body throbbing and twitching and expanding in cold lines, and in the middle the mantra: I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
You are clutching at your face, all that stoic solidity gone in this single moment of pain. Your eye. How will you see? Without depth perception how will you last a single battle? And the betrayal stings hot and heavy in your sockets, causing you to weep bloody tears.
You are swinging a sword to slice through the friend of your adolescence, if Elena can be called such-
You are swinging a sword to slice through a phantasm deep within the joined minds of a monstrous being.
You are swinging your sword to cut down the vulnerable naked body that perches upon a coiling mass of yoma in the lake.
You are swinging your sword in vengeance.
You are swinging your sword in anger.
You are hurting.
You can't lift your sword.
You can feel it coming.
There is something in the dark, moving.
You can't lift your sword-
You are walking through one of the backstreets of Dismas, hair drawn up into a tail, out of uniform and swordless. A little girl trips into the gutter and scrapes her knee. She has scruffy red hair and plump hands, nothing like you at that age. Her face screws up and her chin wobbles, and instinctively you go to her. Pick her up and dust her off. When you reassure her, she stares up at you with a finger in her mouth and there is no fear in her eyes. This is what you sacrificed for vengeance.
You are gritting your teeth and trying again. Below the ankle your foot is a pulpy red mass with glints of bone. The pain is only a phantom, though, given the way your entire leg has been sliced from your body at the thigh. Closing your eyes and reaching deep within you, you can feel the way your teeth elongate in your mouth, the veins standing up around your face, the bones in your arms grinding, Just a little more. Slowly. Patiently. You find the energy to encourage one tendon to another. Rejoin nerves that scream like metal and fire. Skin merging smoothly into skin. Your hands are slippery with blood - it's all over you. You must have lost a lot, but a quarter wasn't ever really yours to begin with. Breath panting even as you try to keep it even. It's reattaching. It's reattaching! You can feel your foot now, an ugly vivid sensation, but even that injury no longer seems insurmountable.
Then tentacles lash out and with a girlish giggle Riful slices cleanly through all your hard work.
When you pick up your severed leg to try again, it is with the twisted claws of a monster.
You are bracing yourself for impact when the sword slams into you. Irene is relentless, and even though you want to learn, need to be better, stronger, the strongest, your missing arm has unbalanced you, and you haven't managed to compensate for it yet. You try to ignore it as much as possible, try not to think about the future. You saw cripples in Rabona, praying in the temple, begging with bowls and incense, their future a dark and immediate shadow over their head. Irene swings again.
You are so close to Awakening that you can't help it. The whole world has narrowed to the last of your restraint, a desperate inner clenching as you strain for just one more drop of energy, one more moment as a human. Jean's face is long gone from your mind, the mental block of her presence that lasted all the way from Pieta shattered into a million pieces. This is what it feels like, to hold, and breathe, and wait for the sword to fall. Only you have sent no black card. No-one is coming to execute you while you are still a human. And some part of you is grateful. Not because you are holding out the hope that you could cone back from this, for there is no room in your head for hope. Just grinding pain, your body throbbing and twitching and expanding in cold lines, and in the middle the mantra: I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die.
You are clutching at your face, all that stoic solidity gone in this single moment of pain. Your eye. How will you see? Without depth perception how will you last a single battle? And the betrayal stings hot and heavy in your sockets, causing you to weep bloody tears.
You are swinging a sword to slice through the friend of your adolescence, if Elena can be called such-
You are swinging a sword to slice through a phantasm deep within the joined minds of a monstrous being.
You are swinging your sword to cut down the vulnerable naked body that perches upon a coiling mass of yoma in the lake.
You are swinging your sword in vengeance.
You are swinging your sword in anger.
You are hurting.
You can't lift your sword.
You can feel it coming.
There is something in the dark, moving.
You can't lift your sword-