Fall 91st, 511 AV When we start killing It's all coming down right now From the nightmare we've created, I want to be awakened somehow It still followed her, haunted her footsteps. Every day she looked out her window it was the first thing she saw. Every day she returned to the Inn it chased at her heels. The House of Broken Mirrors had hungrily sought the Ethaefal the entirety of her time in Alvadas, unrelenting in it's obsession even after she and Ambrose had walked its halls and stared into its alluring horror. It had tried to show her something then, something to crack her and make her forget she was dreaming. She had stopped seeing after she had seen the moon, though. Laughing, laughing. Always laughing at her. Mocking her. Abandoning her. Watching her. In all of her life, short as it was, Siofra had know one to hold on to. No one to talk to who would understand and who wouldn't leave her after she had given parts of her she couldn't hope to reclaim. She only had the House. The House had never left her. It was the only thing here that seemed to even like her. Even if this was an illusion, a mockery of what her life had been, she had to appreciate the obsessive House that followed her. It was devoted, unlike most things. As the sun set, her form shifted. Scales melted into wan flesh, fangs became teeth, muscle became sinew. She went from full snake to full 'human' within moments, her horns the last thing to touch her body. White hair, touched by strands of orange, and black horns with a faint gleam of yellow crowned her head. She could have been an entirely new person from the Ethaefal of Fall now that Winter breached the horizon. Her shift would complete as night progressed, she knew. She would know her body now, although she already had an idea. The Ethaefal turned from the window and chittered at the ferret huddled under the bed. Her bags, packed and ready for another relocation, sat dejected upon the unused mattress. It had been such a waste to even buy the room, she reflected. It was nothing more than a retreat to her own miserable thoughts and dejected murmurs. She never slept but for a few occasions, and on each of those she was so conveniently not in bed. Her room, now that she thought about it, was a place where she could be alone by herself and not be judged for it. It was where she could consider how to wake up and plot how to return to Leth's realm. She knew, after all, that this was nothing but a horrible nightmare. This loneliness didn't exist in the waking world. This terror, this rage, this misery. "I'm going now," she said softly to the ferret, the one living thing that had stayed by her side in the night. She looked back out the window to that brooding house. "I'll try to be back by my shift's end. I want you to see it." Her eyes strayed to the moon. Before she swept from the room, she reached to her backpack and drew from it a wrapped bundle. The ferret chittered at her as she left, hopping to the window and watching her through oddly glittering eyes. ***************************************************************************************************************************** The Inn was quiet but for the gentle, unceasing rumble of shifting rooms. It was dead. Fitting, really, that she should be alone in the beginning and alone in the end. Out in the street silvered by the moonlight and clotted by snow, empty but for the fading whisper of a pedestrian's gait. The House hadn't moved, not one inch, and it waited expectantly for her to enter and face the truth. Above it, the moon tilted in a leering smile. She couldn't look at it. She felt she would cry. "I'll show you what it looks like, Father," she muttered as she passed across the street, ghostlike with her pale skin lit like the glass of Lhavit in the night contrasted by the dark wool of her cloak. Silent, she passed into the House. She didn't look behind her, didn't care if someone thought to look at her, to follow her, to care about her. She knew what she was. She knew what this was. For all she cared to know, she was asleep and the dream would end soon. If the House would allow it. |