Sweet Cinnamoth
EXP: 37,766, Level: 8
Level completed: 31%,
EXP required for next Level: 6,234
It was odd, so odd, how dreamlike reality started to become without any sleep.
Song drifted through the air. A woman’s husky voice. Lullabies. Song that became discordant, abstract and jumbled, if he focused too hard on it. The other fae, the strange and almost human fae of Dheathain, didn’t hear it. Fenn had asked them. Written out questions in shaking hand. Nothing. It was all him. A mere figment of his imagination. A phantom of his mind, grasping at him with a searing grip.
He was here because…
Here because…
Something about wanted to learn more about others like him. Something about heritage. Regent Banrion’s words were lost in his mind.
The boy wandered through the foreign marketplace, stumbling over himself. Normally, he would be flitting from stall to stall, falling over himself trying to see every exotic ware there was. Pockets around him would be mysterious lightened of their trinkets. Fruit would vanish from their impressive pyramid piles. Beautiful Dheathanian creatures would be admired. Maybe someone would catch him napping atop their colorful cloth canopy and shoo him away. Maybe he’d be scolded for stealing a sip of someone’s drink. Right now though, it was an effort to put one foot in front of the other.
There was a burning in the blackened scars ringing his wrists and ankles, another phantom presence he couldn’t explain. He wanted the burning to stop. His hands itched at the dark rings, drawing up thin lines of blood and no relief. The stone under his feet was cracked from the sheer cold radiating off of him. Fenn stared at the cracks, trying to make sense of the spiderwebbed pattern beneath him. Focusing his eyes on it — on anything — was a monumental strain that ached hollow within his skull.
He was faintly aware that the others in the marketplace were staring. It was hard to make himself care about what they thought.
No, he hadn’t slept in a while, and he was starting to have trouble remembering why that was.
It faintly registered to him that he needed sleep. It was necessary for the function of a physical body, even one as strange as that of the fae. Fenn rubbed his eyes as he staggered deep into a quiet alley, trying to make something of his bleary, color-streaked vision the same way he tried to make something of his situation; with little success. Once, he’d caught wind of a rumor that there was a man who had died from going without sleep for months and months on end. How long had he been awake?
Once more, the boy tripped over his own feet; first he fell to his knees, then to his hands, then collapsed with the whole of his body against spongy earth. This time he did not get up. With a sigh of defeat, he let the darkness of slumber carry him off.
~ § ~ § ~ § ~
Dark things crept from the crevice of light.
There was no Banrion to save him, not in these dreams. She had said something- had said something about him pushing her out, away from his head, when she last struggled to make contact with him. He hadn’t meant to do that. He still didn’t mean to do it, but it seemed to be happening anyway. She had told him about a— the scars— what had happened to his past self— he didn’t want— and—
They were skittering things, flying down on wings of sharp edges and fear.
A flood of sensations filled him with each one that brushed by. Mostly, it was a burning that spread across his wrists, ankles. It was hands around his neck. It was the scent of blood and iron. It was red, and black cracks across his vision.
He couldn’t scream.
Fenn broke back into the waking world with the loudest squeak he’d ever heard out of himself.
The lingering memory of the dream cut into his chest like an iron dagger. He clasped his hands over his heart, feeling it twitch and spasm from inside his ribs. The boy rocked in place, scrabbling desperately to orient himself in the waking world. He couldn’t sleep again, he couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t… With each beat of outrage, the air around him crackled with cold, the awful humidity breaking out in a blight of spontaneous snow. White, white, white. Fenn started into it. The bright ruins around were deeply frozen and barely thawing — and they were in a recent, extreme state of disrepair. Fog wafted off of them in the direct sunlight. The little fae blinked and stared at the broken rock and fallen walls. This wasn’t where he had last passed out. This wasn’t the marketplace. That much, he could discern.
He… must have done this. Whatever “this†was. Had he been wandering as he slumbered? Again?
In the glossy ice, he caught his reflection. It wavered. Squinting blearily at it, Fenn tried making sense of it. His wings, his antennae, they were gone — the skin around his wrists was raw grey flesh and dripping black. A pang of fear sent a new wave of snow billowing out from the fae as he yanked his gaze away and frantically felt his back and his head for his insectoid limbs. No they were- they were still there, falling and rising with his breath. There was no blood. He glanced back to the puddle again, hands clenched. The reflection was normal. The other him, the him with missing parts and fresh injuries, had flickered away.
He didn’t know that past-him, but he absolutely knew that he would rather not be him.
Want Daugi, he thought blearily, rubbing at his eyes. Despite having slept, he was exhausted. Absolutely exhausted. The only thing about him that still seemed to be functional was the cadence of his magic; it sang in the air around him, sang of the north and the snow he missed. It raged against the heat and the cage of his frail form.
Uneasy footsteps caused him to pan his gaze up from the walls.
It was a woman, he reckoned through his fading sight. One short and dark of complexion. For a moment, he thought that perhaps she was another hallucination, but frowned as she didn’t fuzz away with the next few blinks of his eyes.
She called out to him. It took him a moment to register what she was saying.
Fenn felt his consciousness flicker.
Oh. Oh no.
â€Get back,†he said in a woozy flutter of his hands. He was so light-headed, the simple lift of his arms left him dizzy. Colors swam in front of his eyes again. Desperately, Fenn hoped he was understood. â€Leave me. Hurts.â€
Turgid winds circled around him as he felt himself begin to pass out again. He felt himself lift just slightly off the ground from the sheer force of them. No! The fae clenched his hands, feeling the bite of his nails make black-beading moon-sliver cuts in his palms, but it wasn’t enough. Whatever mindless unconscious self would surface in his absence, he did not know. White became not only a quality of the walls about, but now the very air itself as he slipped away.
Last edited by FennWenn; 07-20-2018 at 03:39 PM.