#//I had a thought about assistant Orana being a reoccurring position among her verses

[orxna]

Reasons To Cup a Face || Accepting || @avrorean sent;

[CHECK]: after an unexpectedly violent situation, sender frantically rushes to check if the receiver is okay, cupping their face to look closer.

Sulhan’harel is nearly covered in blood. None of it is her own, she knows as she examines her dress with dull eyes. Even her face was not spared, for while she wore a mask over her mouth and nose she can feel the itching gummy feeling upon her forehead. The tacky feel of what must be staining her pale hair and eyebrows a livid crimson. The irrational little voice in her mind almost wonders if it will stain and even if she doesn’t die here and Hawke saves her when she leaves this retching place everyone will know what she has done here—

Sulhan’harel smiles softly at the woman who gently ferries her back to her cage—Room. She thinks the only place unmarred must have been her back, but now she feels the lingering gore upon the Lady of Halla soaking into the fabric of her back. Her smile twitches—

There is flesh trapped beneath her nails, she thinks from the lining of a stomach—not the inner bit full of acid that she fears will be the cause of some skin abrasion that will leave her corrupted in body as much as mind—where fat met flesh. The Lady had asked her to reach within, for the young elf’s hands were smaller than her elder’s. Easier to grab hold of little strings of muscle and sinew, delicately snipping them out like old seams on a dress that needed to be let out.

These people were not darkspawn, at least not yet. She doesn’t know if that is worse than when they are fully blighted. She decides it is less frightening, when she can pretend the exposure is somehow lesser and that she will not eventually end up on this table herself—that when she looks down at her monstrous hand she remembers when she was—

Tainted, these poor souls, but not misshapen—they are now, she thinks with less revulsion than she had the first time she was ‘asked’ to assist her Lady Aunt in surgery. That is a bad word for it, an inadequate word but if Orana thinks too hard on how to describe it she sees Danarius in her minds eye and she cannot. She cannot think of him here, in this place or she will crack—

She feels fingers upon her cheeks. Her mind skitters sideways, out of the spiral it had been careening through. Like a moth with one injured wing fluttering down to the ground in circles, a gentle hand cups one cheek as the other threads into her hair. There is a light pressure, but not a hurting one, just enough of a tug that her mind stops twirling. She realizes suddenly that Ghilan’nain is gone, not even her maniacal tittering lingering in her wake. They are well and truly alone again, and for the first time in hours Orana breathes.

“Oh, hello Nanna,” Orana says what feels like mere moments later but realizes she must have taken too long to speak as rage blossoms in her sister’s eyes like red spider lillies fresh in season, “No, no, no, I’m quite alright, it isn’t mine!”

Her cheeks hurt from smiling, from creasing her eyes so those too look content and not deadened, “I’m alright, please.”