#(non chronological just various moments in which cotesia got her shit rocked)

[rotten-pest]

Scar

The festering burn hissed with pain at the slightest touch. Even her shirt had been too much, rubbing the raw and blistered skin until she’d just said blast it and took it off. Exposure to Limgrave’s cool air soothed, slightly, as mist-like rain fell gently. There was no deliverance from it, as yet she could tell. It oozed and peeled and burned just as badly as it did when the young prophet had put his seal up to his face and spat fire on her chest.

-

She does remember the first time she broke a bone. For Pests, losing a limb was difficult but not necessarily life threatening—there were many for a reason, of course. And it’d be grown back in the next molt, usually, so one just needed to survive until then (and survive the molt itself)—save those of either advanced age or after repeated injury. She’d once pulled off one of her legs molting—which hurt, yes, but no more than maybe pulling off a nail did. It ached for a while and then was fine. When she slipped and fell down a cliff, tumbling down the wet rocky face of a hill on Stormhill, she was bewildered by the sheer intensity of pain coming from her ankle. It was such a throbbing thing, all electric, and worse—it was not solvable by anything other than rest. She tried everything, really, but any weight at all just made the thing scream in agony and all she could do was curse and hobble, before finally bid to rest.

-

She’s struck by an arrow. She eventually manages to foment her courage enough to push it through the full well. When pin-prick tears welled up, she was more annoyed at how their saltiness made her eyes hurt.

-

The mercenary’s dog takes a bite out of her arm. It hurts, quite terribly. Each point of its teeth a bright star of a sort of dull agony—an old dog, with dull teeth. It whimpers and lets go when she shoves the dagger into its breast, and finds herself reminiscing on her own hound. A guard, for when her body was squishier and fragile even than the human form she now took. Afflicted by rot, it was a wary thing, even to the other Pests, and yet entertained her childish antics all the same. She wonders who tends to it now, but briefly, before discarding the thought.

-

There’s a hundred injuries she doesn’t quite care to place fully. How many times can one care about a scrape, a cut? Even the times she’s run through with the point of a sword or a spear or a dagger, slashed and gashed all over, they are inconsequential things now. She is alive where others are dead, after all. A burn where she sets the fire, scratched palms of her hands after working metal, or wood, or through climbing and scaling rocks or buildings. It all serves, in the end, to remind her of the fragility of humans. Their soft skin, it bruised mottled reds, browns, purples, blues. Pests bled, yes, but it was different. Pest blood was clear, sloshing around their bodies with some movement urged along by a simple set of pumps, whereas humans kept their blood relatively neat, organized and directed through veins and arteries, forced by an elaborate four chambered heart. It almost seemed excessive, but the difference could be measured—sometimes it felt like she could walk or run for hours, whereas in the past she’d tire much more quickly. Humans kept their rigid bits internal, like scaffolding. Rigid armor splits when bent too far, so Pests made up for this fact by being many-segmented.

-

The absolute agony of serrated claws slashing through the tender flesh of her face. Humans had an excessive number of muscles to create minute facial expressions to facilitate communication where their other senses failed them. And feeling there those muscles had now torn, been split by chitinous claws, was an acute torture. She can feel in excruciating detail where each digit dragged through her meat, tearing through it. Even after, she can almost taste the lingering scent of fury, of rage, of acrid betrayal as bitter as a hot coal on the skin. Blood pours out of the wound and down her face, into her mouth and eye, and burns. She tastes her own blood, her human blood, red and viscous, for the first time and is revolted by its overwhelming metallic taste. And what she does not expect is, for the terror to last so long after the danger itself has passed. Her heart, like a rabbit kicking in her cage of a chest, breath choking up in seizing fits, almost gasping.

What a wretched feeling.