grace requires nothing of me
Desperation lured her further into the swamp like a siren’s song that she couldn’t hear but which still gripped her heart and tugged it along. She followed its invisible will lest the pump be ripped clean of her chest.
Long blades of grass and frilly fronds brushed against her legs as she cut a path through the thick mud and humus. Nirrah flew ahead, soaring above the marshland and dodging the rare tree.
Soon—or maybe not so, for time didn’t seem to flow here, stagnant like the water around her—she had reached a spot where she no longer felt her usher’s presence. She had only just noticed when another urge surged into her, this one allowing her to stand still.
She screamed.
At the image of Elias she still saw so clearly in her mind’s eye.
At the happiness that eluded her.
At herself for not being enough.
Months of frustration exploded with the pressure of having been contained for just as long.
Critters of all kinds skittered in the underbrush, their auras retreating from around her in a halo. Hope followed suit; Efret felt its distant warmth pulling further away, still there but almost gone.
She took a deep breath, drawing ancient, earthy musk through her nose. The air scratched against her lungs, almost painful, burning, but she paid it no mind and screamed again.
A cloud of isolated fog rose up from a fern-like shrub in front of her a few meters. Efret blinked, trying to understand its provenance. It was a cold morning, but such a small pocket of condensation shouldn’t have been forming, let alone drifting slightly into the clear, crisp surrounding air.
No.
No, it wasn’t fog. It was smoke.
Irregular rings bloomed on the foliage, opening little portholes that viewed the otherwise obscured young fire burning orange and yellow.
Efret stepped backward and looked down at the peat underfoot.
Had she caught it?
She reached out both physically and energetically to the Force to smother the flames, but recoiled when something shifted in her mind. Her consciousness almost cracked as it settled along the fault scarp, straddled between reality and…nightmare. Her face contorted in confusion.
The scab on her mind over the wound that Malva'ikh Dralidok had cleaved during, and even after, their first encounter, had begun to weep recently on Woostri, but now blood seeped from it anew. A hairline cracked, then two, three, more, and then the dam breached—not with the terrible tremors of an outburst flood but the effusive dread of impending overwhelm.
A vision was coming, coalescing in the space between here among the waterlogged grasses and somewhere else, somewhere broken, somewhere in untold agony, somewhere clamped in a young but cold and domineering iron grip.
Somewhere Core-ward.
She saw the form as it began to nucleate, not from her perspective, but from Nirrah’s as across the clearing from where she set on a leafless branch. Brushing her mind gently but urgently, Efret bade the convor to stay where she was. Her skin crawled across her muscle fascia like bugs over bark even as she watched a humanoid appear.
