@northridden
The days are trying. The nights are harder.
Jessamine discovers an only semi-surprising anticipation of the darkness that she never had before. She wouldn’t call it fear, per se, but a gradual tightening of her shoulders, a tension singing through her spine up into her skull, where it pulls and throbs at her temples. She tries to rub her neck the way Corvo used to when she was pregnant and still insisting on working, when she would work herself into terrible tension migraines and be unable to do anything but sit in her rooms stubbornly not weeping, but though it produces some interesting near-electric sensations in her head, it does little to relieve the pain.
And with the pain comes a certain distance in her mind, a crack allowing whatever remained of the Void’s knowledge to seep in, to crawl insidiously into her heart and mind, to lay thick on her tongue. When she lays down, tries to rest, she finds that she whispers to herself, secrets often about herself- and while they’re no surprise to her, she dislikes hearing them voiced all the same.
Far better to wander the streets and hear the secrets of others until she’s too tired for her tension and anticipation to keep her awake. If she speaks the secrets the Void knows while she sleeps, then so be it- at least she can’t hear it.
So she finds herself in Mare Nectaris after the sun has set, only starlight gleaming on the water to guide her. The sea smells wrong, here- it’s too warm, too clean, not nearly sour enough, but it provides enough secrets that repetition doesn’t become agonizing. And as she walks slowly, carefully out of reach of the incoming tide, she finds herself less wandering than being pulled in a specific direction, towards a slowly beating heart, and towards one word, repeating in her mind again and again until she’s mouthing it silently.
North. North. North. North. North.
She’s quietly unsurprised when the pull ceases and she faces a familiar presence in the semi-dark. The one who seeks, the one who is sometimes the one being sought and sometimes no one at all. Her mouth stops moving, for a moment, and then she says, soft and distant like the billowing of sheer fabric in the wind, “You think of ...him. Of it.” Her head tilts, brows furrowing, before she shifts to sit on the sand next to them, not waiting for an invitation.
“Can you find what you seek, from here?”
