#dhaedre

I’m home. 

Or at least, I’m in a very good dream about being home. As much as I hoped and wanted, I don’t think I ever thought this would actually happen. It made more sense to die there. For me to fight a battle I’d just lose faster and faster, until my body caved in with the effort and crumbled. No, instead, I’m home. I’m glad to be back. The others seem glad to have me back, which is sweet. 

They come in and keep me company. I like that. I don’t want to be alone. Even if this is a dream, I’d rather sit around and talk nonsense things that don’t matter as opposed to what I’m doing right now—staring ahead, counting the steps to the exits, thinking about everything. 

I can’t eat. I’m so hungry it hurts, but I can’t eat. Everything that touches my tongue is flesh and blood, the body and soul of something else that once lived and breathed. I can feel it, I can taste it, and it wakes the monster inside me. The monster says to eat, but I can’t. I won’t. I am not that. I refuse to be. Except that morality won’t fill my stomach. 

I need to find another way.

Isendil doesn’t understand, though to be honest as much as I may have told myself I was explaining to him—I wasn’t. What benefit is there in my explaining myself to him? He would turn away. If any of them understood, they would shun me. They see my attempts at being good and use those as some sort of proof of my worth, and I let them. I let them be fond of me and keep me company here, I can’t help it.

I need it.

I take it.

As I said to Isendil, a few coins does not pay for the blackened soul. And yet, I keep doing this. I leech these fond feelings from them, bask in attention and these beautiful ideas they have of me, and in return I am at the beck and call of the Inflorescence—as though turning my nature to their cause might be fair payment for what I steal, and it’s not. It never will be.

I do it anyway.

I saw the bodies on the way out of the cave. Hanging there like the ones in that asura’s horror house. How close did I come to being up there with them? If I did, it was deserved. For what I did to those poor broken bodies, I deserve no better than to live out my last breaths as a battery too. Sometimes I close my eyes to see them still hanging there, the sequence of those I have wronged seems to get longer with every action I take.

I still have Dhaedre’s chain as well. I’m too afraid to give it back. The moment it unloops from me, the torrents of elemental power will fill me again with intoxicating strength and it’s too much. It’s dangerous. I’m afraid of it. 

I’m still so afraid.

Virtuosity knows the commands. Only my hunt is stronger than those, and it gives him the power to command me against those dear to me—even if I told him it doesn’t. I know it does. I also can’t get that girl out of my head, the Elonian girl. I failed her. She’s there in the back of my mind, nestled with the hunt, a thorn constantly pricking at my mind—I need to do something about it, I don’t know what. I’m stuck here.

Stuck in the infirmary.

Have I simply traded one prison for another?

Does it even matter?

I’m so hungry. I need to eat. I’ve lost so much weight I feel near dizzy. Too light. But I can’t eat the flesh of another. I can’t—

—Eat the flesh of another.