the bible didn't mention us

China Rose Lykoi · 12-01-2011, 05:40 AM

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ooc: Private. Pictou falls, Northern Halycon.

Wordcount: 5+

It was cold beside the falls. The kind of blistering cold that begins as a burning fire across exposed flesh, until blissfully sliding into numbness.

The numbness was more frightening than the pain, but China had been feeling it long before she had left Inferni. That cold had started on the inside, slowly freezing her outward, until she forgot how to smile. There had been the girl - The soft warm girl, with the pretty ice-blue eyes. China had savored her like some sort of final meal, and she had not been disappointed. Perhaps, in the beginning, she had expected such a simple cure - To find redemption in the feminine arms of another sinner, another one of her kin. Although Myrika had provided some respite from the storm, it had come anyway, and she had left without looking back at the ghastly, leering skulls.

She had wandered with a vague sense of being lost. The songbird had considered saying goodbye to her sister, to Sage - The other, Clover, had left some time prior. But if Sage had seen her in this condition, this deterioration of body and soul, the daughter of the Earthmother would surely never have let her leave. And how could she had explained herself to her sister's questioning gaze, when her tongue held fast? No, far better to slip away like a wraith or a ghost, like a dream, like a snowflake that melts on the tongue. Far better that way.

A vagrant thought had sent her to the borders of Ichika, where her father had rumored to dwell. For a long time she had lingered there, surviving on the misfortune of small animals that died by falling into hazardous crevasses or natural causes or simply of the oncoming cold. Her ability to hunt seemed to have long fled, and with each passing day she grew thinner, weaker - More of a shadow of a girl, than an actual one. The emptiness within, where in sunny days prior a sweet tune might have welled forth, or perhaps the merry notes of her little pipe, festered like an infection. Her voice, her song, had been taken. There was a thin scar across her throat; Not enough to have physically damaged her vocal chords, but enough. Enough to have silenced them.

The man still haunted her dreams, and she would wake, alone in the cold, gasping and weeping dryly, her body wracked with spasm-like sobs. Sometimes the dreams were vivid enough that she would take handfuls of cold, withering moss and scrub at herself, scrub and scrub until her silvery hair began to fall out and the raw spots on the pads on her palms would crack, and bleed. But the process made her feel better, at least - Made it easier to suck lungfulls of cold air in.

Sometime, China wasn't too sure of when, she had caught fever. Malnourishment and physical exhaustion had stripped her bare to the bone, and the heat burrowed in and came in terrible flashes, burning her dry and then leaving her to freeze. Unable to wait any longer, she traveled west, using up whatever steely strength was harbored in the marrow of her bones to press onward. Her hair, once a neat bob, had grown long and unkempt. Her beauty remained - Like a spectral thing, like something from out of this world. It would remain surely until she was little more than a pile of lovely bones.

The fever took her again, sometime during the agonizingly slow trek northwest. Instinctively, she stuck to the mountains - Out in the open she would be easy pickings for any predator. However, she feared no death at their hands, only one. Only one hunter, one beast, did she fear so truly.

Dehydration had set in by the time she had reached the falls. Glazed blue eyes of such a pretty lapis lazuli hue gazed in wonder at the water that rushed in a torrent of icy spray from some unknown heaven, far up the mountain. It tumbled down in crystals, forming deeper pools between little and large waterfalls. Desperate for the cool liquid to quench her deadly thirst, the girl dropped to her nears at the side of the nearest pool and flung aside her bag, which spilled out her little flute. Without thought for these items, she began to greedily guzzle water into her dried, shriveled stomach.

China lasted less than ten minutes before the cramps hit - Terrible pains that made lights flash behind her closed eyelids. She threw the water back up, and shivered wretchedly, pathetically, beside the small pool. This was some sort of final agony, some sort of final test. Unwilling to even attempt to stand, the songbird dragged her frame under a small overhang beside the falls, and curled up, there to die. Her flute and bag remained aside the pool, eerily misplaced amongst the serendipitous beauty of the Falls. The running water sang sweet little lullabies, and tucked into the cold bosom of the mountain the girl drifted in and out of a weary consciousness with a small, cold smile.

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