She thinks this: the salt is so engrained in her skin, in her hair, that perhaps it will never be removed; the sunsets over the ocean are still as magnificent as before, graced with the colors of Vespera, but they are less alive than she remembers and more painful; and the moon, the moon that glares in slivers through clouds is too bright. Her prison sharpened her eyes, made light an enemy even moreso than it was three years prior, made her hearing more acute, made a woman into a beast, into a predator willing to do anything to protect and destroy. The stench of the sea clings to her skin, never fully leaving - not now - and it disgusts the magpie girl who walks with ribs out and shoulders bare, who stalks the streets, away from those lapping waters that remind her of the kelpies deep in the swamp. The kelpies that came from the sea, the ones that stole her father - stole her childhood. It leaves a permanent scowl on her lips and frown lines beside bright, intelligent eyes that see everything all too quickly and all too completely.
Even so far away from the coast, it still reaches pale fingers into the city, onto the buildings. So she moves further away, toward the epicenter, toward the place where only the sick and dying stay.
In the gloom of the evening, the hospital is a mausoleum with a yawning mouth, gaping wider and wider, broken teeth for windows laughing and gnashing together, waiting to swallow her. Waiting to bring the magpie girl to her final resting place. She is not sick, not really, not physically, but she craves piece like she craves a warm bowl of porridge. Into the dark cave of life and death she goes, reveling as chemicals hit her nose, cleanliness expunging all traces of salt, until all that is left are the moans of the ill and the taste of that which helps kill them and keep them clean.
Dalmatia moves through the halls as a phantom, quiet and quick, hardly looking left or right. Before her, labyrinthian halls seek to confuse those who do not walk them, but she has. She has. In the times when she was a girl, there was a period where she lay prone upon a bed, stick upon her left side as bandage after bandage was wrapped over her right wing. Sprained, strained, mildly fractured bones groaned when she'd moved then. For months they kept her from her skies, for moths they told her she could not do anything too quickly for fear that she would never fly again.
Then, Eustace had come in often to entertain her, to teach her the new formations of their unit.
Then, things had been so simple.
Now, as she enters the room again, staring at the high window with shutters half open, she knows nothing is ever simple anymore.
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
@
