Sequestered ((Solo))

[DarkDelights]

This is the only place I can go to be alone with my thoughts. I come here often, although it takes a toll on you, getting to that point of exhaustion where there are no dreams to interrupt your rest. Sometimes it takes extraordinary measures, and there has to be a degree of farce to it, or they would suspect something is amiss. They thought that there was nothing here, in this place of deepest unconsciousness, and it was nothing for me to just... slip away for a while because I lost too much blood, or suffered a head injury or, drank my weight in 'shine.

The sleeper, human and small, draped over the small island of jagged jet, horizontal in repose. She sat up, propped on one hand while the other languidly outstretched slim fingers one by one as if testing the stability of their reality. The black markings and images that caged her mortal flesh were gone, and the sheer whiteness of her skin could not be overstated even against the cold black rock. She rose to her feet on the solitary island, and all that she was beneath the Woman in Black was bared for an audience of no-one.

She dove with perfect form into the still green water that surrounded the the ebony stone formation, and her figure was distorted below the surface of the subterranean spring, but made all the more shapely beneath the wake of her dive. She did not come up for air until she reached the far side. Clear water dripped from her black hair which, when drenched, reached to the merry 'Y' shape at the top of her behind. Though she barely crested five-feet in height, her proportions were otherwise generous. She wrung out the excess water and it sparkled in mid-drip, then became one with the cavernous darkness of the chamber's floor. Light seemed subject to fancy, both absent and present, depending on the focus of the Witch, but with no discernible source.

The cavern was laid out in the shape of a pentagon of indeterminate size, sometimes colossal with the freedom to move and stretch and dance, and other times quite small, like the intimacy of one's bedroom when the door is closed and the night is quiet. On the rough face of each of the five walls, a perfect semicircle of ghost-lights illuminated an archway, each passage with a different colour; the lavender of pressed flowers, mint green of favoured bon-bons, the teal of a gemstone, set in a silver brooch, the orange of jack'o'lanterns near All-Hallow's. Pure white like rabbit's fur.

Everything I know is here. I've been chronicling, and recording, and squirrelling, and stashing, and writing and carving for what seems like longer than I can remember. I don't think I'm so old though, am I? A quarter of the way through my first century shouldn't feel like its taken this long to reach it, but it does. Oh my darling, it's been ages and ages and that doesn't even begin to properly express. Maybe you understand, and maybe you don't, how time seems to slow down when the world around you is burning. How a scream can be measured in moments or eons. Has it really only been twenty-five years? Or has it been twenty-five lifetimes? And if a lifetime is measured by the time it takes to live and die, then, well my pet, I must have lived almost 10,000 lifetimes, because every night my soul is betrayed to the Nether-Five by some abusive happenstance, and I die again, and again, and again.

No, I can't go down that path. The futility will awaken me and I don't have much time as it is. Minutes, or hours at most.

Her flesh bobbed, responsive and fit as she padded barefoot across the cavern floor. She stopped before the arch wreathed in flame that was the pale purple of a cherished memory, and although that memory had long ago decomposed, the colour gave her strength like a grandmother's last words.

The Woman lit an ebon torch with the purple light though she did not need it to see. The soft padding of little feet was the only sound that accompanied the tiny white figure wreathed in protective purple light as it disappeared down the vaulted hall.