#lmk if you need anything changed! i figured the lack of verbal blockade would make them generate enough noise to catch her attention tho

[beholdenning]

One day, you find yourself waking up thoroughly sore, scraping yourself off the floor of a Monastery classroom. As you strain to remember how you wound up there, you catch sight of your hand – except it’s not yours. Nor are the clothes you now wear, or the body beneath them. Your actual self is standing opposite you, staring back in shock and… covered in dust? [...] [Grants Any Weapon +1]

Night, dawn, sunrise. Light begins to stream through uncovered windows upon closed lids. The first bits of birdsong had started since the fifth bell of the day, which Denning had been listening to intently alongside the slow activity of the monastery's earliest risers — Themself soon to be among them — When instead, a pull into heaviness seizes them, a most curious lapse of consciousness.

Dawn, sunrise, morning. Light trickles through shuttered windows upon closed lids, eyes rolling and darting underneath, crusted with a foreign grain, the fabric of soft sheets catching on fingertips, a pillow smelling lovely of soap, the weight and stifle of a blanket and fabric upon skin. The morning is still cold upon the cusp of spring, but the room, the light makes it pleasantly warm.

Something is wrong.

Something is very wrong.

Try as they might, Denning cannot bolt upright. Even their eyes resist articulation, weighted down, as if their entire body is covered by a smothering weight — Incomprehension roils with a tight coil of erratic heat right below their throat, bobbing into their chest; Below, their abdomen a yawning hollow, an imploding space. But they are not full hollow, no — More warmth rushes through their every extremity in a steady pulse, each choking draw of breath cools the inside of their throat. And in their veins, a blaze calls for them to beckon forth — Like that peculiar arena, but they cannot discern why —

It is. Too much. Too much. What is this? Too much.

There is a strange noise resounding through the air, gasping and thin. Denning does not realise they are the source. Denning does not realise the source is not them. Hands find purchase upon the mattress, but they are small, frail, fragile, flesh —

Flesh?

Something acrid shoots through their gut as they push up onto their knees, blue hair falling into their sight like a curtain. "L-ord Nergal," they rasp, high and tarnished-sweet. (They have never heard this voice, how do they know to make this voice?) "Lord Nergal, what is wrong with me?!" The coil in their throat winds tighter, and they find themself having to clamor for breath as they sit back up, eyes darting wildly.

shut it out, gather yourself, like how you learned to shut the noise of quintessence —

Student-issued room. Ill-kept. Books and tomes and notes and letters and untidy candles. Closet partially ajar, the clothes within in disarray. Denning stumbles back to their feet like a newborn deer, staggers to a mirror, stares into blue eyes, half-crazed —

A fearful young girl stares back at them.

They know this one in passing. Marquess Ostia's daughter. If ever there was a time to wonder about a cruel jest, it would be this. The awful, forsaken coil they cannot name continues to burn, burn, eat them alive, a candle at both sides —

This is simply too much. They fall backwards, painfully, with an unbridled shriek.

@higaneion

synapse, snap back // lilina + denning