Narrative: Pain Who: Azabeth Kordura Where: Denerim When: 3rd week Umbralis, 9:39 Dragon Summary: A near-death experience has Azabeth reflecting on the worst moment of her life. Rating: T for some violence, A for Angstee. We all know you love the character torment.
It had all gone so very, very wrong, somewhere along the way.
She had picked him carelessly, because he had a quick smile and slow dark eyes, and she knew he was probably a thief-catcher or worse but she didn't care, she needed this, in ways she could never explain to anyone else. So she sauntered to his table and flashed her deck and decollatage, and when his smile lit but his eyes stayed cold and black she should have known better, Black Matthew had taught her better than that and he was shaking his head in frustration from the back of her mind, but he looked so much like him that she couldn't resist, a moth drawn to killing flame, burning her own wings in her hubris -
The stable was quiet and dark and smelled of hay and horses, an unpleasant smell to most but achingly familiar to her nose; the straw was harsh and irritating on her cheek, sticking in her hair and under her blood-slick fingers, but in that moment she preferred it to the softest of silk sheets in Thedas. The horses were wickering and stamping in their stalls, made nervous by the scent of blood, and for that she was sorry - she was so, so sorry, for so many reasons, curled on her side in the hay and praying she would die, praying that this pain would end, all of it. Azabeth Kordura was not a religious woman by any stretch of imagination, but if the Maker had granted her reprieve she would have gone to Him singing utterly heartfelt praises, a thief repenting on the cross.
But if the Maker heard her prayers, His only answer was a resounding No, and Azabeth wept, cradled in a puddle of hay and blood - too weak to stand, too strong to die.
- she hadn't expected the nightmares, that the feeling of remaining next to another warm body, no matter how brief, would dredge up everything she had worked so carefully to forget. Before she knew it she was sixteen again and there he was and they were arguing at the tops of their lungs, right up until they went nearly silent, which was worse than the shouting, oh so much worse.
"I thought you loved me," she gasped, trembling like a leaf, and he stared at her with those dark eyes and said, in his rough and beautiful tenor voice, "I was wrong."
That hurt more than the scuffle with the stranger when she woke to find him looming over her, hurt more than his dagger in her belly as she plunged her knife into his chest, hurt more than dragging herself through the streets of Denerim, staggering and drunk from loss of blood. So what if the guards had seen her as she forced herself over the wall of the estate? So what if she was leaving a spattered scarlet trail to mark her passage, her clever hands clenched over her abdomen to keep her guts from spilling from her frame? The hay was warm and she would be done with soon enough, safe where the nightmares could not torment her, where Conlan's angry face could not mock her.
She could not force herself to die, but neither could she summon anything other than tears for his recanting of her, even two years gone into dust and memory.
The last time she had stayed beside a man after commencing in that basest of acts was with him, wound together in the sheets with their legs entangled and his breath soft at the back of her neck, dawn light from her window creeping on cat's feet to limn his arms in gold as she watched, heart calm, utterly serene with the world and everything in it. All she had ever wanted was to be safe, somewhere that the evils of the world could not reach her, secure and protected, and then she had found it in the unlikeliest of places. It had been good, better than good, to be comforted, to forget feeling vulnerable for a little while.
Never again. Never again would she have such a moment of terrible weakness, for weakness was a luxury that Azabeth Kordura could not afford.
A midnight sun split the darkness, and she flinched away from it, curling in on herself, not wanting to see, to be seen. The lantern did not care, shining its revealing swords of light upon her still shape anyway.
"Azabeth? Maker's mercy!" Turning away; a shout, powerful and commanding and panicked. "Matthew! Come here, I've found her!"