A pale hand pushed away papers angrily, a small zephyr of parchment fluttered away from the ornate wooden desk. The pulse of pain behind his eyes stabbed like a blade into the soft tissue of his brain. He threw back his head and tried to settle the deep rhythmic throbbing. He had not slept well this night, nor the one before, and even the sleep he had gained the night before that was fitful and limited. "Dementlieu must survive!" He exhaled out the thought, a memory of a moment of terror that had broken his carefully constructed composure. "Ahhhhhh!" He gave a deep, pressured blink to cleanse his eyes of the memories that sought to push back, it was impossible to truly forget the pain as darkness had pushed through his very being.
He understood trauma, it was his focus at this time academically, an alienist and a scholar. However knowing and being were different beasts by breed and his trauma, manifested as rage. Smashing down his hand again against the desk to send more of his writing utensils sailing away, destroying a copy of his current work as the crystalline inkwell shattered in a small cloud of utter black and glass. He swore out loud as the shards of the inkwell sliced the flesh of his pale hand and he stumbled towards the mirror. Clutching the flesh he stared down with open eyes, pupils dilated, glancing up to the dimly lit mirror, the blackness had spread across his skin, splattering across his face. The sight paused his heart.
Within an hour, he was sat, lotus position, spine like a ruler amid the now settled chaos of the room, a panicked mind seeking calm, seeking a shelter from a storm of terrified confusion. After another, he was still there, still in the serenity, an inner gaze that left him surrounded by the trappings of the room, by the discarded papers and half finished scrawling. Seeking a truth inside.
