Pithia

Even in her terrible sorrow, she was angry. Burning with rage. Her fire is not the kind that sweeps forests and leaves only ashes behind. It's the kind that burns underground, hollowing out the ground from under you. It's the kind of anger that's like lava, a force of nature that reshapes the world.

[She] was an intoxicating presence, and her power and position hung over me like the bowed fringe of a weeping willow.

Where do I even start? Where do you begin a tale that tangles like a bramble across the years and twines with the fine and cruel threads of fortune?

The madness I saw in [her] was not a devouring inferno of vengeance, untamable by reason. Rather, it was a furnace—desperation burning bright and terrible, driving her forward.

Whatever truth there is hidden here, you want it buried so deep, its bones petrify in the airless dark.

Some slime-fish of a nightmare, slipping away the moment you try to hold it in your memory, growing dimmer the more you flail at its shape.

Nostalgia sweeps through her, not like a gentle breeze of recollection, but emotions in tidal waves, breaking over her head and soaking her to her marrow, from which she rises like a goddess, or a newborn child, with eyes that see everything differently.

And as [she] puts her thoughts into words and her words into breath, all of a sudden her feelings spring into reality, shaping the path of her future.

She thought that old lesion of inadequacy had long scabbed over, but her months in Daqiao have softened and dissolved those scars, once again exposing her tender flesh.

Guilt crashes through her, not as an avalanche but a slow glacial advance, making her bones heavy.

The thought, once kindled in her head, continues to burn and burn until it is a wall of flame that blots out any other rational thought.

She has actively cut that section of her life away, and the resulting wound she does not want to think about.

[S]he is spared from having to give a solid answer, spared from having to pry open the lid of her chest and look inside at the tangled, bloody mess that is her thoughts about home and mother.

It feels like part of her has cracked, but in the way frost cracks in the spring.

[T]he revelations... have had time to settle and become architecture in her mind.

The emotions that flood her pull her in a thousand different directions; she has no words in any language to describe the heavy, golden feeling that settles in her chest.

Possibilities and theories dance in [her] mind and gnaw at her sanity.