self-pity

                "I hate everything about you

                                Why do I love you?"

She didn't sleep.  She never slept.

Come on.  If you were dead, did you really need to sleep?  You'd already attained the "eternal sleep" and slapped it in the face.

The crickets were not her only nighttime companions. She did a lot of talking to herself, too.

It was one of those nights where her thoughts would not leave her alone no matter what she tried to do. Working out was pointless: no muscle growth. Sometimes she swam in the ocean, diving down deep to pressures that would kill a living humanoid just to explore. Nothing frightened her anymore. Not even the vastness of the open ocean.

Imbrey sat in her tiny inn room above the Arrow's Song. Her old quarters had been rented out long after her death, likely with no explanation as to what happened to the former tenant. As a result, she was stuck in this small room with the hearth blazing more for comfort than actual warmth. Her hands finished plaiting the waist-length white hair that she had just washed. Such a task probably wasn't necessary, but she preferred to stay fresh-smelling for customers.

        Three Years ago...  

        There were only so many drops before you hit rock bottom. Only so many pitfalls before you sprained something or hit your head too hard. Maybe you'd get up, but the body and the psyche would be forever scarred. You were never the same person as you limped away from the scene of the accident, acting as a stark, unpleasant reminder of the ugly side of life to the people who went their whole lives without experiencing it.

Her nostrals stiffen and she coughs to expel the sudden intake of frigid, crisp air from her lungs.  Again, while tracking her dear friend, the General, through their beloved Eversong woodlands, she suddenly finds herself trudging through a land buried beneath a mantle of crystalline frost.  A howling wind whips across the frozen landscape from the southeast, carrying with it the scent of the sea, but all that is visable on the horizon are the heavy storm clouds rapidly rolling inland.  To the north, she spies a deciduous tree line, their boughs weighed down with the burden of previous snow accumulation.  With the prospect of the incoming storm and essentially no supplies, she decides to make for the forest where finding kindling for a fire and decent shelter from the arctic storm may prove more favorable.  

The sun beat down warmly on the rough surface of the massive rock in the middle of Booty Bay harbour. One could almost ignore the filthy little shantytown if one looked toward the horizon.

The sea, a deep blue-green turquoise, lapped like a loving pet at the edges of the rock, and the girl resting on it breathed deeply of the humid, heavy hot air. It was here that Ythfas had touched her tenderly. Almost a year and a half. Longer in truth. She lay silent, still. Her body bared to the tropical sun, and used to its heat, feeling the hammering oppression a Northerner might dread and closing her eyes to the caress of the sun of her home.

Her home. It had been, anyway. Once.