1st-7th of Glade, 121
With a soft sigh Fawn took the hand of the palace escort and stepped down from the carriage onto the cobblestone below. Had the streets always been so uneven under her feet? She turned to thank the man briefly. He simply bowed to her, a look of worry behind his brow that she recognized as the same emotion directed at her for the past 53 days; pity. She hated it. It churned her gut as she watched him and the carriage ride off back down the pathway towards the palace.
When the sound of hooves clopping against stone could no longer be heard Fawn turned back to the shop and stared at it for a long while. A few people passed her by, and though many might have simply bumped into her some strange aura around her seemed to clue them in to her presence before they collided, and they instead rushed to avoid her with more pitiful expressions. That alone sent the girl quickly reaching for the doorknob and yanking it straight back. Much like her first day there the door was nearly slammed behind her as she rushed through the hallway and up towards the room she had been allowed to call her own. If Lyra was there she made no gesture of welcome, no noise of greeting, and trudged up the stairs without much care for her well being as she bumped clumsily into the doorframe at the top. Her ribs were healed of course, at least enough to go back to normal life, but they'd still advised her to take it easy for another few to make sure the fractures had healed completely. That, and old fractures are often easy to re-splinter.
But somehow the pain was welcomed from her. The delicate care by the palace guards had made her feel fragile. Of course, she had been, but inside she burned to feel something. Perhaps that was why she had enjoyed the baths so much- the water always just slightly too hot, and though the maids had helped her scrub dirt from her skin the memory was not so easily cleaned.
As she slipped into the bedroom and shut the door behind her, she locked it. A quick moment later and she unlocked it though. Something about that specific sound had felt like snakes in her chest and stomach, coiling and slithering through her with the memory of Havershim. With the lock of the door. With the feeling of lightening-
And now, no longer juiced up on the palace herbs to curb her anxiety, she fell onto the bed in a heap of sobs.
Seven days passed. Each day feeling longer than the last, and for most of them she did not move. The first two days were spent staring out of her window and scratching the skin on her arm where a small scar had formed. She could have prevented it, used the ointment and paste Lyra had somehow left in the palace for her to keep the scar at bay much like she'd used on the rest of her body. But no. Fawn wanted just one scar, one mark to remind her to never become that weak again.
On the third day she finally emerged for food. Though she didn't make much, a simple hunk of bread not warmed nor buttered and a glass of water that was left half finished upon her bedside table even upon the fourth day, where she thankfully ate more than just bread. Berries, if she remembered correctly, and some cheese. After the first day she hadn't been heard crying. Instead she was silent, as if made of stone.
But that changed on the seventh day. It was morning, just past 9am and she frozen to the ground of the library reading the same trilogy of books on Kalzasi's nobility that she'd been reading for the past four days. Perhaps it was some way of her finding reasoning for his actions, or maybe to laugh in spite at how far he had fallen from noble to slaughtered- but some part of her wanted to know his history. Make sense of it all. But she found nothing more than small mentions of his name in relation to barely notable events. Both him and his family were so painfully normal, at least as far as nobles go. In the end all he was was a collector of rare artifacts and inflated ego. And that fact alone made him seem so much more human than he had been before. He shouldn't be. He couldn't be. But yet he was, so painfully normal it sickened her.
Her fingers clutched the edges of the book as angry, hateful tears welled up in her eyes. With tensed, shaking arms she let out a scream loud enough it shook the window pane and threw the book across the room. It hit the floor and skidded, pages benting and ripping as it hit the back wall and knocked a few more books from their shelf. Her mind exploded and in that moment she took both other books on Kalzasi Nobility and began ripping page after page out of the book until all that remained were crumples of paper and hot tears surrounding her. She hated him. She wanted to kill him. But he wasn't alive, and she was too weak to do anything even if he was.
