« Reply #9 on: September 20, 2022, 07:31:37 PM »
A heat built up inside of her, starting off as a warm feeling in the throat at first, though it would soon spread outwards from there to be present throughout her entire body. It felt comfortable at first, though the heat grew and grew, until it became this searing sensation that overtook all over the senses and had her doubled over in agony. It burned hotter than any flame ever could, as though the last vestiges of her own humanity were being boiled off.
Suddenly, she was surrounded by an all-consuming flame. Sulfurous smoke filled her lungs and she found that she could barely breathe. The flames rose and rose, though a shape could be seen amongst the hellfire that surrounded her. An angel, an agent of law and justice unperverted and pitiless lay perched atop the clawed hand of a massive marble statue, depicting a handsome horned figure holding a ranseur.
Slithering serpents formed from nothing and sprang like vipers towards her ankles. When they sank their teeth in, a venom that burned even worse than the flame coursed through her, and agony sprang enough. She tried to focus through it on the angels' words, on Garythmar the Aspirer's words. There were only a few grains of sand left in the hourglass, and she was squandering them.
The ride back to Barovia haunted her, too. Gone was the sound of wagon wheels crunching down the leaves into the earth, and sundering errant twigs, replaced instead with the noise of crackling flames, sounds not unlike the roar of a well-tended hearth, though there was no comfort to be found in what she heard. The barking of the Vistani driver were replaced with a harsher voice, still shouting, though in a language predating mortal-kind themselves. The whip, of course, could still be heard, though the sounds of the oxen being driven forward were replaced with a broken man's screams, and the sound of flesh being expertly flayed from bone.
She worked to banish these visions away, these waking nightmares, and yet they would constantly return and still linger in the back of her thoughts. She came to dread slumber, for fear that she would spirited away to the place the visions had shown her and never return. She resolved that it would be different for her. She would not be a slave in this place, but instead one of its queens. She would be different. She would be the punisher, not the punished.
She had to be.
« Last Edit: September 20, 2022, 07:33:10 PM by Imperial »
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