proud opilionid

How often do you think she loitered by Herrah's plinth. Surrounded by mindless husks of her family. Watching them kill and rage indiscriminately when once they used to be brilliant and intelligent craftswomen. Dyou think she spoke to her mother's body, not knowing if her words reached her at all, but speaking anyway because who else was there to listen. Do you think she remembered enough of the before to feel the loss of the after. Dyou think she knows that midwife still waits for her, down there in the darkness.

Do you think she knows the White Lady can't see anymore. That she decays, alone, in her tiny little prison barely bigger than herself. That her existence is nothing but the torture of denial. Do you think she ever searched for the last person she thought of as a mother, fought her way through the hordes of mindless mantises and came upon Dryya's corpse outside the chamber. A memory of the old days chanced upon after all this time, and it's just another ruin when she finally found it. And maybe she just stared long and hard at the dead body of a warrior as fierce as herself, and walked away from that chamber without going in. Without caring to look upon a dead mother a third time.

Idk. Just. The angst of having been raised with care and dedication and attention and maybe even affection. And then watching the people that raised you lose their minds slowly, or be lost forever. One by one by one. People who were smarter and more skilled than you and they're less and less themselves until one day they aren't in there anymore and it's just an animal trying to kill you.

Until one day it's just you. It's just you and it's always been just you and there isn't any end in sight and it will always be just you because nothing changes in this frozen place. And you don't leave. You stay. Because they were all here. It's a ruin now. Filled with nothing but living corpses. But they were all here. No one remains now. No one you cared about back then.

But they were here once. This hell was a home once.

Greymoor 🪡

I draw 🐈