Mercy Seat

Her consciousness had been unspooling down an endless void when a bright light flashes from beneath the eyes of her still body. It strikes fast and swift, like lightning with all the entailing dangers of spark and fire. A jolt passes through the heart and then another. Circulatory rivers inflame the brain with oxygen rejuvenated cells, limbs twitching as hot blood roils against post-mortem chill.

It was her body, but it's *her* now. It's *her* again.

There's smoke and blood and the cleansing scent of rainfall. A taste like iron filling her mouth, the rush in her ears like vast movements of water folding together. Her eyes flutter open unsettling a film of dust and dirt sitting in the crags, and if she's expecting anything different than the void of before, it's only a momentary relief that in the corners of her vision wink a soft blue light, enough to outline silhouettes.

She swivels her head around as best as she can while tied down, finds that she's tethered to raises of stone on an altar intricately carved with symbols vast and small, each etch filled with a half-frozen, black liquid. The ropes are triple-no, quintuple-knotted, and braided with luminous blue threads that pulse with a heart beating precision. Another piece leashes her neck an inch's distance. A bit of metal holds back her tongue, smooth and cylindrical. When she screams the sound slips past and lingers in the air, trailing off into unseen distances. She screams again, a name unintelligible beneath the utter revulsion, and fury that has her writhing on the bed of stone like a snake piked in the sand.

She flexes her hands and pulls at the ropes. Blood spreads down branch-like tendons, pooling into divots of wrinkles in coppery ink spills. There's more down her torso. The odd thing is, she can't feel the wounds eluded to by the image. Her ribs stick out like a lions maw, but she can't feel the soreness that comes from the vacancy. The air is drenched in cold and all of it pools at the center of her space on the altar.

She tilts her head forward, a sudden realization that a foreign weight is on her chest, light as a feather but burning with unbelonged presence.

A rose. A thorny, plump rose, illuminated in blue with centerfolds spiraling into deep dark crevices, sitting between her breasts in perfect shape over an open gash in her dress, right where a dagger would have ripped the thin material open to get to her heart.

The rose is dewy, touched with a glaze of rain.

She loves roses.

That bastard. That fucking *bastard*.

She stresses her bindings with skin ripping pulls, every layer of frost having settled around her joints splintering like glass.

Woods, caves, fire and clay. Magic spells, and blood-soaked sigils. Water to douse out the flames. The smell of earth too pure and artificial, tempered with sheets of rain.

A ritual had been made here. A dark ritual that feasted on life to bring about a power equivalent opposite and horrible. The sticky, viscous liquid congealed and frozen in the altar's carvings is blood, hers to be exact, and all of it had to be half a bodys' worth at least if the symbols on the altar were to have been so dark as to look scorched in the grain of the stone, as if the power of them had already been dried and used.

How is she alive?

Besides the rigidity of her body, the wounds from her tugging at the ropes, and the pressure of stones digging at her back, she feels nothing of further inconvenience. She can feel the ghost of a stab to her chest, but not the brunt of the assault. Someone had to heal her body, but whose magic was there to have brought her back from the brink? She knew these symbols, knew this ritual and the consequences that called for death and nothing less.

Unfettered vitality. A souls displacement in the afterlife. An infinite and permanent decision.

Someone died so that she may live. But who? Who cared for her enough to allow her to live? Who knew she would be here? She loved no one. Left behind no one. Something died, something as gratuitous in life fibers as a human.

Her eyes bulged, a breath held and stuck, surprise relenting to utter mortification.

Her Familiar.

A feline black as night, loyal to a fault, eyes mellowed with an undeterminable pride. Her life is entangled with it, not so much as to endanger hers when it wandered off, but vice versa was the truth of the matter.

Djoli is dead. Djoli *has* to be dead.

A low aching whine escapes through the bar and her chest collapses inwards. Pain for the loss of her pet. Hurt for the loss of a friend. Fury for the gaining of an enemy. And a tinge of fear for how well that enemy knew her as a friend. Tears bloomed at the corners of her eyes and spilled.

She grit her jaw and reached for a spark of energy deep in the pits of her fragile being. Where there was usually a swirl of energy, smoky and rich like the heat of a campfire, there coagulated instead, a sludge-like dark matter. It clung to the walls of her cavernous well like freshly cut sap. She knew her magic was, for the short time being, dead. She managed to blow out smoke from her breath but little else came with it. She wasn't able to conjure magic. What little she left was probably being breathed away, and the other source was out of the realm of possibility with her so weak and sodden as is.

She breathes deep, and focuses on one hand, thick, terse rope giving way to the eroded stone beneath. Her wrists are scraping and new wounds open, but willpower keeps the rope whittling.

Eventually the wounds on her wrist kiss cool air. She flexes her hand testing the strength in her tendons. The first thing she does is rip off the rose and throw it to the ground. She scrabbles at the other hand-tie and it's off. The threads once cut lose their glow. The one at her neck is harder to unravel, but her fingers settle their clacking to get the work done, and lastly is the one at her mouth. She spits out the bar and hears it clang down unseen steps below.

She shot up from the bed of rocks, and they rolled off her back like slippery stones. They were slick with her blood, and left dents in her skin that either split open or bruised with a palette curated from a child's rendition of a sunset--out of line bleeds, and all.

She looks around on buckling knees. The length of time in the dark has not improved her vision. All there is to take in are the charred remains of her last memory.

Jade green eyes and golden hair, wispy, yet strong. Limbs supple and pale wavering in the pool of her memory like the moon fractured on water.

She had thought those things so mundane, cliche even. They shouldn't have mattered. There's limits to what magic should and can't do and green eyes and golden hair led focus away from the exponential possibilities that came with breaking them. But it was what he wanted, his part to a years-long endeavor too significant to delay with petty arguments. They were, again, so insignificant in the grand scheme of something evolutionary.

An argument regardless ensued, a scalpel close at hand.

She should have went for it, plunged the scalpel right in the center of her spellbook where a hand had lain flat on a sigil. But doing such would have soiled the book's thin and delicate pages, pages that already soiled every aspect of the natural order, pages stained with the blood, sweat, and shameful tears she fostered for every hard-won experiment and thorn-pathed discovery. It was quite frankly the most selfish decision she had ever made, for the most rightful ambition her blackened heart could conceive.

She will fix this. It wasn't an if, but when. It wouldn't do to stick around any further. She had to heal, plan; make lists of what to do, what to gather, who to meet, and who to kill. She will fix this.

She hobbled directionless, feeling out her surroundings which undoubtedly held scattered bits of ritual paraphernalia. Forgetting briefly how the platform descended, stumbling down it cost the rigidity of her left kneecap. Tumbling the rest of the way her birdlike legs entangled with the scraps of her garment.

Persistence held back the stars and vomit creeping her throat. She hobbled further towards the sound of the wind, hoping for a wall to follow and lead out towards a tunnel.

Thinking she made it to one of the chambers' ends, she rushes forward, and trips over something long and furry, hitting the wall with her side cursing.

It could be a sleeping animal. she carefully backs away before realizing no sound or movement is directed towards her. She reaches out a hesitant hand, and hearing nothing, moves forward. The fur is short and blends seamlessly into the night, and the body is large as a grown man. It's cold, and gives no discernable reaction to touch.

Her heart stills and withers with more prodding. A sticky, wetness mats the fur, the body sinewy with muscle like a large cat. There are a few signs of a scuffle, the shaping of a scar here and there, but most noticeably, is the head that feels malformed. Pulpy almost.

She keels over the animals' prone form trembling, moaning out grief-stricken words and dotting wet kisses between its ears.

Djoli her beloved panther. Loyal to a fault.

A few lingering scratches on a spot under its jaw where it liked to be touched best and she withdraws.

This time the vomit couldn't be kept in, and the cave now smells of damp musk and vomit.

She wished she could give him a proper burial, will have to leave him like this, alone in the deep dark. Fitting for an isolated creature, but not an easing thought for her weary heart. He'll go back to the earth may be, hopefully. She prays it's by natural decay rather than the sordid means of other animals lurking to feast.

Another lingering kiss before pulling herself up, noticing soon after that the wall is also wet with blood. She maneuvers herself over and follows the direction of the wind, hands palming rock and the occasional blown-out candle, wishing that there were animals creeping about the place only to not feel so painfully alone.

Eventually what wafts is the smell of cavern flora. The floor disappears into the soil. A pinpoint of light grows and dims ahead. Her vision has always been an untrustworthy guide with color being usually bland, but any division from black is welcome. She can't run but she doesn't need to lay flat on the wall anymore. The center of her world is a tunnel with light poking out at the end, expanding without heat into a single, solid block of color. And that color was golden. A golden morning. She closes her eyes for the rest of the journey on a whim, wants the first thing she sees to be a full-blown picture, sun streaming down with a rainbow-like benevolence, a promise of better days to come.

When the dark underneath her eyes turn a yellow-tinged red, she flips them open and sees a sprawling forest, a small clearing leading away from the entrance of the cave.

She bathes in the morning glow. It's dawn and the forest is edged with burning gradients that spill out onto the crisp pure snow. Whatever happened last night and of those who took part in the atrocities, all evidence is covered in a thick winter smattering. The trees are bare in this setting, but so clustered together to still convey a lush feeling. It doesn't make her smile, but to see that chaos has not permeated the place is a small solace.

Taking a deep breath, she hobbles over to the nearest tree and rests on the trunk, shortly grabbing at branches overhead and snaping them into matching lengths, binding them together with a ripped hem from her dress. She takes more ripped scraps and wraps them around her feet. When she has her full breath back, she leans half her weight on the band of sticks, and uses it to trudge her way through the snow.

The makeshift cane pokes at her wrinkled hands, not properly bound, but it is what she has. She could afford to bleed a bit more. Her body is mostly numb but the lingering magic of her broken bond should carry her through.

Soon she will find shelter, warmth, and engorge on the timeless energy of magic that was as vital to her as breathing. She will get back her book, and it won't be a matter of if but when. Magic had broken this, had broken her. Magic will mend it.