Hale Cress

Anew

Doubt crept into her head but this was always going to be where she seen herself in the future and not how she got there. She couldn’t be within her own head, at least not now. Roiling pain filled every fiber of her being and blackened her veins. Hale could barely feel the small, cold vial that has stopped moving between her finger tips.

For a long time she was the one that created goods for those around her that brought others to their knees and meeting makers but she had never thought she would try the toxins for herself.

Slowly she blinked and the chilled moisture clung to the far corners of her eyes while her murky void laden eyes stared at the ceiling above her. Her stomach lurched again but it was not from the Skyflare toxin within her body, it was the change within her when she allowed the void to vessel her body. At her peripheral she seen the wispy void fingers flicking this way and that as if in its own melodramatic dance. Tiredly, her eyes closed for a brief moment before opening again and finally her fingers twitched to move over the glass vial within her palm.

It lasted for a while.

Long enough to dull the pain and silence the screams and thoughts within her head.

“Do you feel numb yet? Have we fixed you?” the shadow hissed at the ground near her ear where Hale had laid.

There was a heavy silence for a time and she managed to turn her head to the shadow that followed her since her ritual in Dalaran. Staring back at her was a ebon cloud of her own visage, twisted and dampened with malice, “Not yet.” she quietly added with a crackle of her voice.

“Not yet.”Hale repeated and she went back to staring at the ceiling. Allowing herself today to just melt away from reality and bask in the death of one to be re-birthed as another. Change. Just like a snake where they often shed their skins to grow, for her this was just a simple method to being able to think without vivid pain.

“Tomorrow…we head to Tiragarde. I need to find work.”

“We need to find work.” the voice swiftly responded with correction and then silence filled the room once more.