Medea's touch on her shoulder seemed to almost ground her and repel her all at once. It was nice to feel something solid and real, but at the same time she wanted to pull away, to not have any contact against her tainted flesh, a feeling of panic and a need to
hide rising inside of her. She forced herself to stand still, to allow the shard to be extracted from her hand, even as her heart beat mercilessly hard and fast inside of her chest. She forced herself to listen to Medea's words, to concentrate on them, to try and drown out the whispers in her head. The path
had been dangerous, yes, but not in the way she was accustomed to. But rewarding? How had any of this been rewarding?
She watched the woman tap the shard, the grey clearing slightly as another color tried to shine through. Yellow.....She frowned, her heart seizing up at that all too familiar hue. Medea's words only further verified what she was already thinking, and her eyes darted to the golden bangle on her arm where the yellow shard usually lay, it's spot empty and dark.
"No...No how is that possible?" Her voice was still hoarse, and she hated it because it so loudly advertised how weak she had been. But the High Priestess continued, and she felt more and more the shame of how she had failed, how she had let other voices besides her own whisper so enticingly into her ear, and how she had followed them.
Weak.
The shard was pressed back into her own hand and she stared at it's murky depths, stared at the cracks that spread from the edges inwards, feeling nothing but numb. She had thought that she still had some time, that she could find a way to make this all end. But now as she looked at that shard she could feel that her spirit and hope was becoming just as cracked and tainted.
But there was something else there. A current of something she had not felt in quite some time. Strength, power, Fear. Was that the reward of the trial? To be a bit stronger at the cost of her sanity? Did this mean she had not failed completely?
"But it will break, won't it?" She finally said, her eyes rising, a gold that seemed to almost glow.
"Unless I can find a way to stop it. It will break and I will break with it." She was forcing herself to calm down, to breathe, to make sense of what had just happened.
"Can you help me?" She asked, finally doing what she should have done from the beginning. Asking for help.
Zoobey
might as well get her semi-started on her way~
