🦋 ALTHEA
The empty solitude became my only companion when they left me by myself. And all I could do was suffer in it.
My face had grown heavy, the salty streams coating my skin barely dry before new tears joined them, cutting fresh paths through the old.
Constant pain had never been very far from the life I had lived, but this incessant searing was something beyond anything I'd endured before. It wasn't just physical—though the brand burned like a living coal pressed into my shoulder blade, never cooling, never easing. It was the wrongness of it. The violation.
Someone was inside me. Clawing through my soul like they owned it.
I tried to breathe through it, the way I'd learned to breathe through Morgana's punishments, through hunger, through the Labyrinth's horrors. But this was different. This didn't end. Didn't fade. Just burned and burned and burned—
