>>6169207# # # # # #
You grit your teeth.
Sweat, which has ran down your neck, soon evaporated, leaving your skin tingly.
Between broken - harsh - breaths - in and out - in and out - you keep your eyes closed, focusing yourself on your inner world, on the face of your parents, on your war embraces, on the touch of Ansàrra.
The warm, soft one.
While Soralisa sculpts your back.
You expected it to feel unbearably hot, and it was for a couple moments, but it turned cold — and then it left you with a dull ache.
Perhaps your flesh has been cooked too deeply to feel heat anymore.
“I have finished,” Soralisa whispers, lifting the feather from your back.
“— have you?”
“Yes. The glyph is complete.”
You can feel it, feel its shape and trace it back on the path of pain. A circle, and two intertwining triangles, and the circle and the three rays — Her symbol —, and many other ones, too fine and too fresh for you to count.
“Are you well? Can you stand?”
You nod, but you still hold your arms up, and your brunette friend lets go of the feathers, which scrapes against the glass, and then helps your stand. Your back aches. It stings.
Opening your eyes, you check yourself in the monolith’s reflection. It’s a circle, indeed.
Your flesh is red, the lines a deep vermilion, burned. The rest singed with the heat of the flames, to seal it in.
You close your eyes again.
In the darkness, there is a faint golden brightness. Like a haze, a fog that is slowly coalescing in front of you. A guiding light.
You can live with the pain.
With the reek of burnt flesh.
Through it.
“I can stand,” you reply.
“Are you well?”
“I shall be.” You pick up the pieces of your armour and start to fit yourself back with them, hesitating when it’s time to strap your corset. You pull on the latches and—
It presses against the pain, making them flare off like oil sizzling on a searing pan—
“Argia!”
“I am fine.” You finish putting yourself together.
<span class="mu-i">I shall be.</span>
“Did I—” Soralisa hesitates.
“You were great,” you reassure her through your gritted teeth. Starless Night, is this painful. Your back feels like it’s been raked. Which it has. “And your hand was firm.”
“I tried to do my best. I did not want to hurt you.”
“You were great. Thank you. Apologies if I do not pull you into an embrace right now. Did you hurt your own hand using the feather?”
[cont.]
