1181. Wounded minds, 9
(Armylè)
Elyne was feeling awful still.
She felt her body dislocating from within. It felt incoherently changing, as if its inherent biological principles were shifting. Physics and chemistry in her might be weakened. She had the nauseating sensations of her inner organs moving around each other, bumping into one another as if they were trying to abandon her. Lumps moved around and it scared her. Her body was making shapes grow and move around along her nerves, always below her skin, but flowing around oddly. These things like small animals stuck beneath her skin were terrifying to feel and see.
She held on the impulses to rip her skin and extract these hallucinations.
Elyne also began to perceive the sensations a few steps away from her own body. As if bigger arms and longer hair came out of her, invisibly. She felt her heartbeat moving inside her chest, the muscles stretching and changing. She felt the bumps inside a lung, and then moving elsewhere as the organs slid between one another.
The chambers of her heart separated into two different half organs, beating separately in two different places. She felt continuous dread as her body was seemingly experimenting or forgetting how to be.
She felt like a monster, with the heartbeat separated in two inside her reorganised ribcage.
Her unique eye observed her scattering hair, growing longer than she was tall and clinging to everything in the room. It was turning into a cobweb. Other shapes like legs were seemingly trying to emerge out of her.
She was gasping, leaning forward as these new limbs were trying to come out of her back. They were twirling and pushing her skin to rip from the inside.
It came out, her shoulder blade now ripped open. She breathed again, as if it was a lung that had been liberated.
She wasn’t bleeding, but she was struggling to catch her breath.
Her heartbeat echoed inside her head. The pain to her forehead grew again.
She was split between relief and disgust about herself as she felt these transformations. Had it been painful to keep a human face for this long?
She sighed, stretched, feeling these wider limbs reaching the walls of the room and further even. She was growing in this layer of odd reality, closer to a lucid dream. However in this state, Prume wasn’t haunting her. It was refreshing to step away from this for once.
Elyne tried to sit over what should have been her bed. The weird extra limbs were too tall and blocking one another, preventing her movements. Hair was covering their skins, and small feathers were sprouting erratically over these. Like fluffy little flames of chestnut hair. She felt weird seeing these germinations all around the room.
She didn’t understand what was happening. She was turning weird all over, except for her forehead in pain. Something was stuck to remain as it was, without enough room. It was hurting her.
Beyond the surprises and the headache, she was feeling rather alright embracing these changes. It felt better now.
Flakes were falling. Her arms and legs were replaced by other things. Becoming a trunk with a wider net of hair and other things felt alright in this weird dream.
She sighed, feeling her breath coming out of her back rather than within her lungs.
Eventually these hallucinations regrouped and she woke up again.
She reopened her eyes stretching a new human arm, coming out of her torso as it naturally should so. It caused muscles to ache a little as they tensed or stretched.
She stretched until her hand reached a hard surface. She felt as if this skin was new and touching this surface for the first time. Her entire body felt renewed, almost as if still sticky from lingering placenta.
She moved and sat feeling everything sharp as if all her tissues were new. But inside her head and heart, the rot remained there and painful.
Elyne looked through the dark, as this was probably night. Her eyes could see. She could see the perspectives and shapes of things. That was puzzling to her mind.
The multiple organs keeping the separated duties of the heart realigned their rhythms inside. Something was collapsing and falling again inside.
She was dreaming. She realised it.
Even if like all teenagers she had felt different sometimes, she still wasn’t this weird creature able to change its body shape in ways biology wouldn’t really allow.
Her environment changed again, and she began feeling again that she had only one normal heart.
However she didn’t wake. Her head kept heating.
A glow appeared in the middle of nowhere.
It reached out, ripping the thinner veils.
The warm glow emerged into a set of weightless shapes, blurry still to her.
A golden glow, turning bluer and colder as it became clearer.
Peace turned to incomprehension and mild fear. She wasn’t alone anymore?
Elyne looked at it, about to reach out to it in wonder. Could it be?
But it wasn’t Prume’s voice reaching out from it.
It sounded closer to my voice possibly. With a familiar sonority but no identity she could recognise.
The glow was vibrating in front of her, still faceless.
Elyne felt herself sighing, and letting this light burning her apparent skin.
It felt rather empty still, dreaming that she was evaporating and burning, facing this odd light stream.
Her body was disappearing in this dream, yet she remained. It was another way to feel conscious. Everything was continuing to be weird in this dream or perceptions falling.
Still, this side and voice kept knocking, calling out to her. Elyne had not recognised the voice, but eventually replied.
The thoughts met, the connection was made. A link was built through these waves.
E - Who are you?
D - It’s a little harder... Be patient... Your sister is not far...
Elyne recalled to herself pictures and thoughts defining them.
Conjoined by a piece of soul... A good chunk of her still refused to let go of Prume being dead. Another rational part tried to accept this end and loss. Everything was a little in conflict still, and this stranger thought wasn’t helping anything. Elyne couldn’t finish her grieving, nor dig for other layers of truth as Cheryl would have wanted.
And now there was something else, and another voice but mine in her head.
She had no answer and not yet found her way out of these paradoxes. Elyne first needed to leave this dream behind, and its added layer of madness. It occasionally replaced the bad dreams where Prume was the main subject or object. But they didn’t help.
There was another link, and Elyne began to see it more clearly. She was still bound a little to me as my daughter. She couldn’t let go of that collection of links that had bound her to her sister. And there was this other thing, reaching out from the other side of the deep. Another link, opposed to everything else, but well bound to her no matter what.
It was another part of her, and holding her back or down perhaps.
Elyne wanted to live. Her priority wasn’t here.
And now she could recall a little that gaze that had terrified her so much during in her childhood.
The white snakes’ hollow eyes. That other gaze was there, it was behind.
The violet eye had moved closer. It was looking at her through these pale bonds.
Elyne was reminded of that old fear and stepped back. She was leaving this meeting early. She wasn’t yet keen to meet her behind.
She disappeared and left this glow alone in the dark, in the bottom of the pit inside her head.
The violet gaze was nevertheless in there.
Nothingness deformed and the open window to that perspective warped and shut down. As Elyne changed her sleep level, that stranger was left behind or below.
She would wait a little longer.
She would be patient, and wait for another chance to explain. She had something to tell Elyne about what was happening to her, or even them.
~
