The Secrets We Keep (solo)

[Dymphna]

66th of Winter 510AV When a person goes to bed late and wakes much too early, there comes a point where they must sleep. It is a sleep that washes over them as if they’d lain down in sand and the tide slowly rose up over them. An exhausted body eventually gives way to a rest that is imaginably akin to drowning – The mind reeling, working, bouncing over facts, old wounds, joys, and things to do, struggles at first to hold its breath under the tide. Before long, though, the body releases its bubbles in the form of twitching muscles and forces them to go limp when the final deep breath is taken in. The mind, or at least consciousness, is released. The length of that sleep is long. The depth is deep. It’s the type that brings neither dreams nor nightmares. It’s peaceful. Like death. An inquiry of asking how one slept, after all, is sometimes answered with another reporting that they slept like the dead. It’s the falling asleep part – the drowning- that is painful. The mind running amuck, thoughts thrashing about like arms and legs, gasping for air and clarity only to feel water rushing to suffocate the old thoughts with new, more harmful ones. Yes, that is the part that hurts. Sometimes when she lay awake at night, waiting until the sound of every breath around her deepened with sleep, she would simply get up - pulled from the water. She would sneak out, taking a light with her, to work on whatever job she could find to do with her herbs. She would grind, stir, or pick until the threat of falling asleep standing up would come over her. Only then would she go back to bed. Most nights, though, she would lie on her back, staring up at the tallest point inside the pavilion. Through the circle at the top meant to let smoke escape, she would count the stars she could see in the night sky. In winter, if she squinted just right, there were twenty-four at the twenty-fourth bell. The height of each season rendered different ones. Each passing moment took away one or two only to introduce new ones. Thinking, thinking, thinking, she could watch the stars all night if she had to – Breaking only to return her attention back to the task of attempting to focus on counting and not where her thoughts were taking her. Perhaps it was meditation of sorts. It wasn’t a problem when outside of Endrykas on the hunts with Sama’el. She’d noticed that all too keenly. She remembered a time, though, that she’d returned home from enslavement and had much of the same response to being around her surviving family. Eventually the feeling of safety ended. Eventually at night, rarely the daytime, the little voice in her head would start – First a whisper, then a normal volume, and finally a yell. She was hopeful there would be a reprieve from it when she moved, but she was not so optimistic as to believe that it would last. Having grown up in the Opal Clan, Dymphna Whitefeather was well aware that the way to heal snakebites or the only way for emotional traumas was to extract the poison. Others had noticed the young woman’s insomnia, of course, but any questions about it had been met with careful babble about any other number of things that had happened in those years away from Endrykas. Healing did not happen over night. They saw her working on her troubles, getting better day-by-day, so in the end no one really pushed her… These were her thoughts. This was what was rolling back and forth in her brain. These thoughts what were keeping her awake. And so, because she really wasn’t the type to mope about doing nothing, she carefully lifted the small arm of her little sister. The fur that she had been over her was tucked about Kita carefully; she was making sure the child wouldn’t get cold. The dark-haired girl let out a tiny snort of protest to things being moved around her, but other than that she didn’t wake. Kita had only been one when their mother was killed. She’d not been on the trip that took the woman’s life like Dymphna had. By the time Dymphna returned, Kita was more of a child than a baby anymore. The two, despite their sisterly squabbles, were thick as thieves. It was Kita that she would miss the most when she left her pavilion to live with her future husband. She sat there for a moment, studying the child’s face. She wished there was a way she could take her with her, but there was also no way she’d ever suggest it to anyone around her either. Wondering why it was that she could so easily walk away from some children and not others, the worry that she’d come to regret more filled the pit of her stomach. Kita wasn’t even her own. Pushing from the ground, she stood, doing her best to ignore herself, and wobbling a little on long legs that hadn’t moved enough for a few hours. The stiffness of age had yet to visit her, but she’d not exactly been in the best position before others started their nightly tossing and turning. She carefully stepped around someone’s head. Then over another’s body. Pausing as she ran into her father’s sleeping form she looked for the best route of escape. She may have been tall, but the man was… Majestic. After quite a bit of weaving through the sleeping bodies, she made her escape. As she ducked around a curtain that was hanging to separate the sleeping area from the next, she bent down to pick up her coat. When she’d gotten a safe distance from everyone, a twist of her spine allowed for her to slip on the ivory wool and fur coat. The north was colder, of course, but she’d never been one to tolerate any amount of cold very well. The night she stepped out to, though, was brisk. A small puff of frost rolled from between her sighing lips like smoke. Endrykas was never silent, but there was a certain quiet to it that she appreciated once the majority of her people went to sleep. Had there been a breeze, the trampled grass would have made no noise. Cyphrus was dangerous, but on a night like the one she was experiencing it was easy to forget that Endrykas, for all its strengths, was not completely immune to the dangers surrounding it. Her hands squeezed at opposite arms as she moved to hug herself, hoping to pull a little more warmth into her muscles. For a moment she simply stopped to look at the pavilion’s horses – Their forms practically silhouettes save for the moon’s reflection scattering on small parts of their coat. This beauty, though noticed, was easily forgotten as she started to move to the tent her family kept their herbs in. She’d started to wonder if Dara would miss the other horses she was used to, or perhaps worry was a better word for what she was feeling.