ffxivwrite2021 - #27 Benthos

Continued from #25 Silver Lining (link)

((cw: PTSD, implied torture))

The Lochs, 1552 6AE

She was floating. Gently suspended in a fuzzed grey. Like a fog, rolling off the creek that ran through her childhood village. Or the sea… It had been so long since she’d seen it. She thought she might have smiled, had she the capacity. The improbable expanse of blue cast around her, gliding gently over her arms, her legs, her face. Each powerful swell was like the surge of a great beast, far more powerful than she. At the slightest provocation it could seize her in its jaw and crush her between its teeth. And yet she floated, and in drifted an inexorable sense of peace.

This must be it, she wondered. How much longer til she saw the Gates of Thal- though perhaps she’d passed through without realizing. This could be one of the heavens, she supposed, although it would be a great shock to get here instead of being summarily deposited into one of the hells.

But perhaps it was so. And by the will of the gods, she could descend into repose. She closed her eyes, or at least had the sense of doing so but nothing about her surroundings darkened, and consigned herself to the abyss.

She would have been content to stay here forever, she thought, yet there was a peculiar tug in her gut. Like a hand gripped her side and pulled, and in the featureless pale void she felt herself begin to spin. Slowly at first, in a gradual rotation of her body, then faster, like an undertow gripped at her legs and sucked them in. She sat up, or at least she thought she did, but she felt her balance teeter perilously forward, and in a desperate lunge she grabbed out at the fog but seized nothing. No purchase, no succor, just the sense of the whirlpool seizing her up and plunging her head first into the darkness of oblivion.

The first thing she felt was a weight on her arm.

With a sudden snap that resounded in her jaw, Ojene flailed to life. Her limbs flung out in every direction, but something snaked around them tight, and she convulsed with violent force, ripping and tearing with teeth and fingers alike til the bindings fell away and she toppled- hard. Her shoulder struck something solid but she rolled, basilisk-like over the floor til she pulled her feet beneath her and staggered up.

A hand touched her shoulder. She whipped around, and to her shock her hands parted, no manacles binding them tight as they flew fist first. The impact jarred up her arm with a meaty thwack, and the pressure ripped off her shoulder. A shriek poured into her ears like a banshee scream, unnatural and bloodcurdling, and on blind feet she staggered forward, groping every which way as she stumbled into a thick film, then spilled out- and at once she was enveloped by white.

Ojene froze. Pain seared into her eyes, a blinding blur that shattered all vision and yet she could see it so clearly. The ghoulishly placid face, pale and smiling, haloed just outside the blinding sphere as a knife laid against Ojene’s bared middle, til the face turned and washed itself out in the spotlight’s glare save for the protruding lump in its forehead, the alabaster pearl of the third eye-

Through the agony Ojene blinked, and slowly the bright shock began to recede as shape and color drew into form. And it was not the searing flame of a ceruleum beacon she faced, the cold metal of the table absent from her back. There were no cermet walls, no squalid stone floor braced by impassable black bars. It was orange stone, dusted with traces of sandy soil. Scraggly brush poking between a crack in the rocks. A soft breeze breathing through her hair. And most of all, once again, the blue expanse of the sky lit by the steadfast sun.

Her legs gave out, and Ojene collapsed to her knees, then fell back on her heels. Her body contorted forward, palms slapping into the ground, and the gravelly dust ground beneath her fingers. A sob seized her throat, crashing through her body in sharp, keening retorts as she toppled onto her side. The flood of tears plastered her cheek to the warm stone, and her hands gripped at her wrists, for the first time in an age striking not relentless metal but her bony wrists.

She seized them so hard her raw skin cried in protest, but the searing pain shot laughter through her tears, a giddy bubble that surged up through her chest and poured forth like a creature spilling out her throat.

A weight pressed to her shoulder, and her body flinched, but as she cracked her eyes open, choking around a strangled noise, a familiar face loomed over her- the Highlander woman who’d pulled her from the gallows. Her mouth moved, but whatever she said Ojene couldn’t make sense of it, and a moment later arms folded beneath her.

The touch seared, and Ojene’s body twisted to deny it as a sharp wave of revulsion overtook her- but the spiking urge to lash out and roll away fragmented somewhere away from her consciousness. Her eyes fixed on the Highlander’s face- the woman was smiling now, a small gentle thing. And somewhere in the sparking pieces of her mind spilled a soft wave of relief. And so Ojene didn’t fight it as they wrapped their arms beneath her and carried her back the way she’d come- into the recesses of a Resistance tent.

There, laid on a thin bedroll, when she turned her eyes upward she saw no sky. But she grabbed her wrists and wrapped her ankles around each other as the new shards of reality began to sink in. The fetters were gone.

She was free.