Blood in the gears

I'm working out a bit of Lamis's character, and it's hard, but I'm finding that it's being helped along by my own starey, unstable mood (to be honest, the two may be feeding off each other, growing into something bigger than they would be alone). I am not sure if this is a good thing, but it makes me both happy and sad to see my tough-shit DK in such a vulnerable position. She hasn't let down her guard this much since before she died, and even then I really couldn't say how long it might have been. She is not in the habit of lowering the drawbridge. Her moat is a mile-wide churning bottomless froth filled with slithering beasts more maw than body, and this is because Castle Lamis is made of glue and tissue paper.

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Returning to the days when she first began her spiral, I pick up signs of the coming break. The inability to sleep, dark circles under her eyes. Dealing with guild sins (or going long out of her way not to deal with them) drains her, puts cracks in her defenses, revealing old wounds she locked away rather than bare them to the sun to heal. Suddenly old trouble is right under her skin, and she feels his presence in her dark hours, smirking at her decline. Of course he is happy to see it; she deserves this for daring to think she can make it in this world without him, without any part of him. She deserves it because she cried, she deserves it because she begged. She deserves it because she cringed whenever he put his hands on her. Ysani would have known to tell a story, or dance a twirl across the room, or laugh infectiously in his dark and handsome face. Lamis does not know to do any of things, and so she must suffer.

She suffers for what she doesn't know.

He calls her baby, tenderly, this is the voice of making up, of apology, of benevolence. He humors her, helps her. He wants her to be what pleases him. When she is not, he is silent, a shadow with fists and hard, angry feet. He knocks her down to hear her cry. He makes her bleed. Her cries are never answered until the storm is past, and soon she learns to be as silent as he when the storms begin. Her acceptance only frustrates him, she ought to smile to stave off the blows, not take them endlessly. One day she is gone, and he allows it. She is impossible, she is wrong, she will never be what he wants. She isn't worth chasing.

It is a new beginning for Lamis, and she finds her inner discipline echoed in the soothing pulse of the Light. Here is her refuge, here is her rebirth. She builds her walls here in the halls of the holy, taking strength in the force of her devotion. The Light takes her love and gives it back even more beautiful than it left her; the Light never kicks or humiliates her for stumbling at prayers, for choosing the wrong word or gesture, for speaking when she ought to sing.

This is her loss, the mindless gravity in her core that steals her sanity. The loss of Light, the break in communication. She longs for it but it is severed from her. Her love will never again be returned to her, gilded and inspiring. Her life is a bitter ache, a joke without a punchline, full of pain and enemies who thoughtlessly prod and tear at what remains of her tattered heart. She closes the door.