Completed Growing Pains

[Luna Griffinsbane]

Thunder growled, a low sonorous sound that echoed from the high peaks that pierced the very heavens themselves. Those self-same peaks were shrouded today, of course. A steady rain had fallen since the night before, and the sun was powerless to cut through the dreary, rain laden clouds overhead. The deep green of the coniferous trees that made their home this high into the mountains had lost some of their majesty as they drippd fat drops of cold water, branches drooping under the weight of water.

The girl sat on the salvaged remnants of a chair, one of several that had been in the common area. She stared sorrowfully at a patch of ground. A long patch of stacked stones marked the final resting place of her mother, cold flesh interred in the earth as was only proper. Further on down the hill, next to the stream that ran from bank to bank now, was another buried body, that of a stranger.

Charred to the point as to be unrecognizable.

The grave was easy to see from where she sat. The table the chair belonged to was half eaten by flames, and lay in ruin against a wall further into the remnants of her home. The wall in front of her was, of course, gone; charred logs and cracked stones of the foundation all that remained of a stretch of wall and roof twenty feet wide. The rafters hugn precariously overhead, but the young woman paid little heed. In fact, she stared at the patch of stone with the home-made marker and saw little.

Tears cut through the soot on her face, and would have dampened and darkened the drab woolen dress she wore if it weren't for the fact that the grey skies had already seen to it for her. Such was the look of pain on her face that it could make a stone weep to watch.

This is all my fault, ran the litany in her mind. Over and over, since late in the evening when she'd placed the last stone and, bowing in silence, sent her mother off to the great beyond. Over and over, as she stared at the ruins of her home, the haunting echoes of the life that had been here echoing in her ears, tormenting her with a thousand stabbing needles, each prick drawing blood until she was awash in a river of her own misery, caught in a dark place without any way to escape it. What was worse, she didn't even feel that she had the right to escape it. This purgatory of self-loathing, it is only just the beginning and it isn't even half enough.

A week. It had only been a week. Seven days before, she had been oblivious to this new world, this world where an empty hole had been carved into her life - by my own hands - and the entire world had the bottom ripped out from it. Seven days, such a short time, and yet such an eternity. All that she could recall were haunting memories, stripped of all meaning and context. Darkness and heat, terror and screams in the night. The sound of steel on steel, heart-piercing shriek of pain. Images and shadows and sounds, all without logical continuity, all without complete meaning.

She stared at her hands, looking at them as if she had never seen them before. The hands of a killer, intentional or not. And then looked up, the greatest movement she'd made in hours, to look upon the grave of her mother. At some point, she would need to move, she knew this...but part of her wished to remain here, absorbed in her sorrow, until the cruel gods of this world came and took her, too.

To be with the ones she loved, but who were no more.

 

[Esme]

Esme pushed through the break of the trees, moving slow and careful towards the massive echo of energy that had drawn her to the area. She pushed her wild curls back and out of her face, frowning with some confusion at the destruction that had opened out before her.

"What in the--" she murmured to herself, taking a step back into the cover of the thick green branches.

She had come expecting something big, the energy signature required it, but for some reason the destruction of a whole building wasn't entirely what she had been imagining. A ripple of goosebumps flickered up across her skin. She rubbed them away, closing her eyes and delving into her powers.

Her senses spread out from her in a rippling wave, the energy around her serving as a second set of eyes, so to speak, allowing her to see beyond the material. She thrusted her attention into the wreckage, searching for signs of life and any concentrated sources of the lingering magic. Everything served as a clue for what had occurred, even the time between the event and now was not enough to mask details from her.

What she didn't expect was the very sharp, bright source of energy in the middle of it all. A person. Alive. Moving. And well.

She gasped. The pain that echoed off the life bit sharply at Esme, sending her staggering backwards as she snapped back from it all and returned into her own mind. A headache blossomed beautifully through her mind, almost debilitating in its intensity.

"Fuck," she cursed quietly, picking herself off the ground and rubbing at her temple. "Fuck."

She staggered around the treeline, moving in a circle around the clearing in an attempt to get a clearer look. She didn't waste all this energy coming this way for nothing.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

Ultimately, it was the baying of wolves somewhere higher in the mountains that sent her to moving, finally.

Startled out of her torpid state, she sat upright, palming tears from her stained cheeks. The hurt had not gone away, but something else had supplanted it, and she couldn't even find the words within her to describe what it was exactly that had hauled her from contemplation of her crimes. The ghost of some other pain surfaced, briefly, intense but blessedly brief. It mirrored itself through all her flesh, hinting at the source of the mottled bruises that covered every inch of her skin. As if she had been beaten by a particularly vicious thug, or else contracted some horrible disease.

Luna was uneasy. She sensed, faintly, something out there. The sensation itself was foreign, but whatever it was she felt was also foreign, different, undefinable. She rose from the blackened chair, soot marring her rump to meld with the rain and the mud, and backed into the remnants of the farmhouse. Slowly at first, and then with increasing unease, bordering on panice. She made her way to what was left of the kitchen, the smell of char thick in the air, and pulled open a blackened drawer. Simple knives, forged by the local smith. lay there, and she took one up, holding it blade up in a white-knuckled grip.

You are just having fancies, she chided herself. Really, why would she even care? If the ones that had...and her mind shied away from it, from the scene in her mind, half eaten away, of a character dressed in dark leather, flesh seemingly melted from his face, the warped sword burned into his flesh so that, in death, it couldn't even be pried from his grip. She shook her head to dispel that image, feeling her gorge rise.

"I know you're ou-out there!" Her words echoed in the empty home, rang out through the clearing. She didn't expect any reply. "G-go away! Theres nothing here," she added, visibly trembling for some reason. Go away, unless you want to face a soul-eating monster, she wanted to add, but didn't. She willed whoever it was to flee, to leave. Part of her did, anyway. The other part almost wished it was a return of the masked man's comrades, coming to finish the job. A justified end to a monster.

She held the knife in front of her, regardless, as if she would attack anyone who showed themselves.

 

[Esme]

Esme stepped into sight then, her brows pulled and her attention wary yet alert as she took in the obvious source for this scene. She didn't say anything. The rain fell lightly down between them, slowly turning the rubble that sat between them into sludge. Esme didn't move forward. She didn't even enter the building, but she did open one clenched hand.

An unseen force pulled at the knife, hard and insistent as Esme aimed to disarm her.

All the while Luna got no answer, Esme's vibrant eyes boring into Luna's own. They were the only thing of note about her, the rest of her-- the messy blond curls, her small frame-- was distinctly unassuming under the cloak she wore.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

Luna stumbled back a step or two as the woman appeared in her line of sight suddenly, her eyes wide with shock, made larger by the dark circles underscoring them. Her eyes dropped to the sword at her hip, and in the time it took for that she felt....something...stir in the air. A sensation quite unlike anything she was familiar with, like...like when you knew you were being watched, from somewhere.

The knife in her hands slipped from her grip as something powerful took hold of it, and yanked on it, and she gave a small yip of fright at it. What is that? What just happened? Sorrow was replaced, swiftly, by a terror she didn't even know she was capable of feeling. Her blood ran like ice through her veins, and she stumbled several more steps back, until she hit a soot-covered inner wall. Back pressed against it, she held her hands in front of her as if to ward of the apparition.

"Wh-what?" she stammered, face as pale as if she had seen a ghost. "What did you do? Are you a ghost? A demon?" Her voice rose with each moment, fright plain in every word.

Somewhere deep within her, she felt...a blossoming, a sense of heat flowing through her veins. It was, perhaps, not as unfamiliar as she would like it to be, although she still had no idea what it was. Flickering images in her mind, each one more terrifying than the last, ratcheted up her terror until it was a palpable thing, a monster that was more in control of her than she could ever be of it.

The heat rose, and Luna found she was sweating. "Stay back," she shrieked at the newcomer. "Its too... I'm too..." She shook her head. Something stabbed into her mind, a knife of ice and fire. "You'll die!" We'll die! The whole world will die!

 

[Esme]

"Well that's melodramatic," Esme grumbled, tossing the stolen knife off to the side. She didn't appear to intend to hurt Luna. She didn't reach for her sword. Instead she reached out a hand, the energy in the air around her jumping to life and abandoning their lackadaisical pattern of existence to buzz quickly in response to her command.

The heaviness of magic in the air started to shift, leaving hair to stand on ends as Esme began to drag it all towards her. It was like trudging through water, but as each bout of energy touched her skin, it was sucked away into a pinpoint spot at her neck.

The air began to feel stale-- dead, as there was no differentiation over what naturally belonged in the space around them and the remnants of the magic that demolished the building. Esme took it all. Even the buzzing potential of magic jolting off Luna's skin began to draaaag off her-- A dreadfully uncomfortable experience, like pieces of her and that heat were being stolen away.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

Dreadfully uncomfortable wasn't truly a good description for it. It was painful, like having the hair pulled from her flesh and worse, it felt as though the very essence of who she was was being drawn away from her. It was a sensation quite unlike anything she'd ever experienced before. The flames within her flickered and died as if they had never been, and with them went her legs. She crumped into a heap, still staring at the stranger with wide eyes, sweat running down her face as if she'd run a marathon.

The pain didn't cease, though. Didn't increase any either, but she didn't know what was causing it, although she suspected she was looking at the source.

"What...what are you doing to me? What are you doing?" she managed, just barely. She felt suddenly weak, as though she had been in bed with a fever for weeks and was just now getting out on her feet. She found she didn't have the strength to rise, for the moment, and sat back and down heavily enough to elicit a faint sound from her lips.

 

[Esme]

Esme hadn't intended to hurt the girl, but upon seeing that her efforts had snuffed out the dangerous bubble of magic inside the girl ... she didn't stop, either.

She had no intention of being exploded to bits around the forest. It was clear this girl had discovered powers and had no idea how to control them. Esme had come for one reason and one reason only. She saw no reason to stop now.

"Stopping you. You're welcome," she commented, almost lazy in the way she sassed the girl.

She continued to steal away the energy, storing in a place unseen. Despite her uncaring attitude, her gaze remained sharp, watching Luna's vital's as she crumbled like a burnt match stick.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

There was nothing else for the woman to draw from other than the essence of the girl herself, though of course Luna had no idea about any of this. The look on her face was one of confusion commingled with pain, although the latter was beginning to ebb away into a kind of numbness. The more that the stranger drew, the weaker she became, and the more it showed. The mottled bruises stood stark on her flesh now that it looked as though she had become bloodless, skin so pale as to be nearly translucent.

"Stopping me...from what?" she asked sluggishly. She made no effort to get back to her feet, only watching the stranger with eyes now half closed. "I...what?" She shook her head violently, hair flying in a messy halo around her as she did so. "I wasn't doing anything. I don't think I was...?"

 

[Esme]

Esme gave her a heavy look. With no more magic coming from Luna, there was nothing residual left for Esme to siphon off. And so it stopped, Esme avoiding touching the girl's life forcing itself.

She dropped her hand, the skin tingling. "Stopping you from yourself," she grumbled, pulling a gemmed necklace out of her shirt and peering down at it. It sat warm in her hand, vibrant with all the energy stored inside of it. Esme tucked it back into her shirt, giving it a satisfied pat. There. Not so empty now.

Without a further word, she turned to leave.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

The sensation vanished, finally, and with it all of her ills seemed to vanish. She was perplexed by this. What had the woman been doing to her in the first place? If anything, the words that followed the cessation made her even more confused, and a little uneasy. Stopping you from yourself... Did this woman know? About her, something about her? The holes in her memories, the sensation of heat, flames, and the screams of others...those haunted her nights.

What did this stranger know?

"W-wait!" she stammered as the stranger turned to go. "Don't...don't leave! What do you mean? What do you know?" her voice was pleading. Here was another that might know something, anything, to help her figure out the twisted mess her life had become. "Don't leave!"

 

[Esme]

Esme's steps faltered, the high pitched plea reverberating through her.

Echos of past memories bubbled up from dark corners of forgotten times, leaving a chill to prickle over her skin. She let out a breath she had been holding, trying to calm herself and will another step forward. Her foot would not obey, a deep sense of conflict churning inside her gut.

This was not her responsibility.

The girl's internal pain touched at her senses and she snapped her mind back into her body, unaware she had even let herself drift. There was nothing to say, but for a moment, she had stopped moving.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

The silence stretched, and the girl let her hand fall, her head drop so that she was staring at the ground. "I...don't understand. Whats happened here, whats happening to me," she whispered, a trembling tone that conveyed all the swirling emotions within her mind. Within her heart. I killed my mother!

She squeezed her eyes shut, tight, tears forming at the corner.

"Please. I think I am going mad. Tell me, am I crazy or is...is this all real?"

 

[Esme]

Esme let out a long, heavy sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose.

She was so going to regret this.

Her fist clenched inside her cloak. She turned with a swirl, approaching the girl at a brisk but harmless pace. Once again, Luna received no answer, just the piercing gaze of Esme blue eyes as she extended a hand down to her.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

The silence continued to stretch, broken only by the sound of footsteps crunching on the charred wood that littered the ground. Luna didn't look up for a long moment, nightmares swirling around in her head of things she might have done, and things she might yet do.

And when she looked up, she found a piercing blue gaze directed at her, striking to the core of her being. It was such an intense thing, and she blinked, wanting to recoil from it. What did this woman see when she looked at her, when she peered through her eyes - the windows to her soul? A monster? A burden?

She tentatively offered her own hand, clearly intimidated by this woman. And yet, curiosity drove her forward, and a deep, unyielding need to gain knowledge of....what?

That was the point.

 

[Esme]

As their hands brushed Luna would only get to feel the callouses of Esme's own before it hit-- Sudden chaos split through the girl's head, a cacophony of sounds and a flash of disorienting images flooding her senses.

Esme wasted no time. Her hidden hand flashed out and aimed to smash the butt edge of a dagger into the girl's temple, attempting knock her out in that intense moment of distraction.




~~~



The sun was gone by the time Luna would stir. It wasn't clear where they were, but the trees didn't look much different from her home and the air was just as chilly. The girl was unbound. A fire roared strongly in the center of the camp, throwing off heat that kept both safe from the worst of things.

Esme sat across from it all, silent as sat unmoving on the other side of the flames. She stared into it, as still as a statue, as if she wasn't even present at all.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

The other woman's hand had the calloused nature of someone who worked for a living, much like Luna's own. The life of a farmer was hardly something easy, even if it was simple. She was still wary of this strange, nameless woman...and yet, she was also completely unfamiliar with the world and its ways, especially beyond the borders of her quiet little village and quieter farm.

There was no way she could have anticipated the trick that the woman played, a jolt of something she couldn't understand followed by a vicious blow to the head. It wasn't as if the distraction was even needed, but then how would the stranger know that? The blow landed in that confused moment, and darkness swallowed everything.

-

She snapped awake suddenly, sitting bolt upright from where she lay, a yelp on her lips. A moment only, unfocused eyes turned somewhere deep within, and then she was bent over, retching loudly, whole body convulsing with the effort. There was nothing to spew forth, though, but a little water and stomach acid. After a minute or so, she collapsed back to the ground, head spinning. Onyl after a little longer did her eyes clear - mostly, anyway - and could she take in her surroundings.

The heat from the fire was welcome. Luna moved, hesitantly, head swimming as she did. The fact that she wasn't secured in any fashion didn't really sink in. Only the fact that the woman sitting across the fire had struck her and taken her....where? Only that was important to her now. Now it was time to decide what to do about the situation.

But what could she do? Sitting up, she almost threw up again. Her head spun, pain radiating from the right temple, where she'd been struck. She stared muzzily at the stranger across from her, oblivious to the fact that she was...distant. "What....did you do that for," she asked in a thick voice.

 

[Esme]

"What did you blow up that house for?" Esme quipped, her voice calm as she gave a heavy blink and shifted her gaze through the blaze to the girl on the other side.

Well, not really a girl. An adult. A woman. Too old to be doing something like this. How could she really have no control?

She studied her, expression unrevealing and unwavering as Luna regained her senses and pulled towards the fire.

"There's water by your foot," she pointed out, still unmoving.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

What did you blow up that house for?

Fragmented visions, pieces of memory that had no chronological order and made little sense. Luna shuddered visibly as she heard the scream, felt the pulse of power wash over her like a wave. She shook her head to dispel the image.

She said nothing for a moment, taking up the water and drinking deeply of it. It quelled the nausea, at least a little, though it did little to stop her vision from swimming every time she moved quickly. She looked through the flames at her...captor? But she wasn't really captive, was she?

"Did I?" she asked, knowing, somehow, that she had. The mode of it was beyond her. The concept of magic was, while not unknown, distinctly foreign. Something that happened elsewhere, in far off lands where hero's slayed dragons and kings fought other kings over women and land and things of that nature. Things found in storybooks, occasionally glimpsed in the real world but nevertheless fanciful. "You....sound so sure, but I couldn't have," she added, a little more forcefully than strictly speaking necessary.

 

[Esme]

Esme raised a judgmental brow, letting the challenging silence hang thickly through the air.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

She could only maintain eye contact for a moment, and then she dropped her head away from that gaze. "But I am just...I am just a farmer! I can't have that kind of...," she said, trailing off. There was too much fear there, too much disbelief that she could be such a creature. A monster, in truth. Were all those fanciful heroes monsters, too, then? Those heroes weren't her though.

She struggled visibly to master her fear as the silence stretched on. "How?" she asked, thickly. "How could I do such a thing? am no...no hero, or great person. Just a farmer..."

 

[Esme]

Esme gave a delicate shrug, emotionless before Luna's own trauma and confusion. She would get over this. She'd adapt, they always did. Babying her would only extend it. Best the girl just accepted the reality of this and move on.

"You don't need to be someone special to be different."

She stood then, brushing dirt off her hands as she walked off to the side and picked up the limp bodies of two rabbits.

She came back over, the clearing quiet spare the loud crackling of fire warming the night air. "Do you know how to skin?" She held one out in one hand. In the other, a dagger was flipped and offered handle-end before Luna's face.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

She didn't agree, in her heart of hearts. Being different wasn't necessarily a good thing, either. She had known one or two who were locals who were different, and everyone eyed them i na certain way, emphasizing their difference from everyone else.

She blinked at the critters and the knife, shrugged, and took the blade, but only for a moment. With practiced motions, she slit the skin down the chest and across the belly, but only just beneath the hide, before handing it back to the stranger. She worked her fingers between flesh and hide, separating them with casual ease, before popping the heads off and gutting them through their neck cavity with as brutal a squeeze on their guts as she could manage.

"I don't want to be different," she said as she went about the work, pulling the rest of the hide offuntil it was attahced by the feet only, then popping the joints just above the feet. "But I don't know if there is any way to go back."

She handed the dressed rabbits back to the stranger. "What happened back there? You seem to know but...but I can't ...I can't remember clearly..."

 

[Esme]

Esme wordless accepted them back, spearing the meat through sharpened sticks and hanging them over the flame.

She gave the woman a delicate shrug. "How should I know. You're the one that had been living there. The building wasn't hot. It wasn't even warm. You really going to tell me you can't remember all those days?" She challenged, looking up from her work to raise a brow at Luna.

She didn't buy it. The woman remembered. She just didn't want to believe it. Esme didn't have time for that shit. Dinner was cooking.

She put the last twig in the makeshift spit and rubbed her hands off with pin needles.

 

[Luna Griffinsbane]

Luna shook her head emphatically. "No, I don't remember that evening. Not all of it, just bits and pieces." She related the fragmented memory of fire, of screams. A knife flying through the air, the impression of great sorrow and pain.

"I remember feeding the cows in the morning...and then not another whole memory until I woke up in the village a few days later." She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes, shaking her head. "I've tried, but...I can't fit the pieces together." She looked up, at the strange woman. "What was it you just did a moment ago? I felt....strange...."