( Aylin would prefer just being stabbed // always accepting ) SHAR [ @alostsister ] WROTE: ❝Your Mother does not care for you. Look at how she watches even now, unable to reach you … or unwilling. I could care for you. She is my sister after all. You need only ask.❞
A DRY-THROATED CHUCKLE SCRAPED OFF the stones. The sound ran til it was rasping for air. Then it dove deep into her lungs and burst free with full vigor — a deep-bellied, hysterical laugh that screeched through the air like talons rending metal. Aylin jerked her head, shocked by her own sound, but did not falter in it. What was a sore neck to her anyway? Such sensation was one of the few truths she could cling to in this place proving she was alive, this was real. No, she was only surprised the Shadowfell did not swallow her laughter. Perhaps Shar meant to use it to taunt her with how sepulchral her existence had become.
She choked on a cycle of coughs. The taste of blood lingered at the back of her throat, the first taste she'd had of anything in . . . Damn, as if time had any place here. She could trust her track of it about as much as she could the scraps of food or water that wandered near her enclosure. She touched none of it. But however dry her throat, however coarse her voice, she would not hold her tongue on account of this hag.
❝Oh, how magnanimous You are, Great Lady of Lies. How generous, You from whose loins all purloiners have sprung, to offer back to me what you have stolen!!❞ The last shouted words broke and dissipated in the darkness, and a fit of coughing fiercer than the first gripped her. She dropped to her knees and pounded at the stones once, twice, thrice. She stayed thus even as the fit lessened — yet their sound was still dissonant enough to conceal one smaller. A soft, persistent scraping.
There was blood pouring down Aylin's hand. Her own life's essence was the only color she saw in the Shadowfell; it had robbed her of all others. But, her blood was still here, still hot, slicking her hands and softening the grime at which she dug. She could not tell if her nails had only been badly cracked or if she'd torn them off entirely with her efforts, but it didn't matter. They would come back the next time she died. All that was taken from her came back, and there was a grim comfort in that. At least this time it was her choice to lose them, not some madman prying them from her hands.
With their sacrifice she pried up a stone from beneath her ritual circle. Her voice broke again as she cried aloud and hoisted it in the air. It slipped in the blood and struck her foot. She cursed, hoisted it again, and threw it as hard as she could. Putrid specter's hands clawed her back from the edges of her enclosure, throwing her aim wide. Her strength was faltering now; she would have to die again to regain it. Yet, the stone struck one of the wretched plaques encircling her, informing those foul Sharran initiates of the creature before them as if she was some animal in a zoo. There was pleasure in that. Enough to set her grinning.
She wondered if the moon was smiling, too, and all petty joy fled. That was the ache she could not bear; that was the worst torment her Aunt could inflict upon her. Tears in the heavens, there weren't even stars in this place . . .
