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She had a skip in her step all the way down the mountain, until she realized she didn’t need to actually walk down the hill. She could just step off the side and sort of fallllllll…
“Ouch,” Hail said as she hit the ground. There was a rather nasty crunching sound which appeared to be the sound that most of the bones in her body made when they broke.
The Dark had only said she was immortal, she realized. He hadn’t said that she was impervious to damage. Oh dear. Oh no.
“Oh HELL!”
She lay, screaming at the top of her lungs for a good while, until she ran out of screams and then was left with hoarse whimpers which also did not help at all. Day turned into night, and then night turned into day, and then day went back into night, and then back into day and she got very hungry and quite thirsty, but nobody came by with food or drink. She felt as though she was dying of both concerns, but she couldn’t actually die. Her only option was to lie there in agony and curse the Dark over and over for as long as it took for her bones to knit back together enough for her to become mobile again.
A month starving in a bush did nothing to improve her temper, but when she finally clambered to her feet Hail was more determined than ever to leave Mount Eternal and go to Entigon City, where someone immortal might just have a really good time.
She was about to walk past the sign post which designated Mount Eternal as being separate from the Plains of Grains when she hit an invisible barrier. She tried to push past it, but it was as if the world simply stopped there, as if everything past that point was just a drawing of a distant scene that had never actually existed.
As an orphan of the Welt’s wars, she knew all too well that there was a world outside New Rahvin. It was just not a world she had any access to anymore.
“DARK!”
She called for the demon, knowing that it was not obligated to come. It had ignored her many cries for mercy over the weeks. Sometimes she had felt it nearby, watching, enjoying her pain, but never offering anything in the way of succor.
The Dark came anyway, in a flourish of shadows. It enjoyed her suffering, as much as it enjoyed her pleasure. It wanted intensity. It did not care what kind of intensity. It would drink her tears or it would revel in her pleasure. It was the same.
“You have been suffering so long I can smell it on you.” The Dark loomed hungrily, drawing so close she could taste that bitterness on her tongue, the fizzing sensation which heralded one of its many appendages.
“Yes. Anyway. Why can’t I go over there?” She pointed in the direction of the bridge.
“Oh, did I forget to mention? You’ll never leave Mount Eternal again. That is another one of the conditions of the curse I have put upon you. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. Most of your kind never leave the mountain anyway.”
“What kind is that?”
“Bryn's cursed brood. His whelps who grow up into bitches who whelp their own pointless pups.”
Hail lost her patience then. It was one thing for the Dark to insult her, something else for it to speak cruel words about Bryn and the others.
“Okay, that’s enough, you can slither back into the shadows and…”
The breath was stopped in her throat as the Dark grasped her suddenly by that part and held her tight, her feet dangling inches from the ground. Its eyes flared with dragon fury, burning into her brain so intensely she felt his stare like a physical pain.
“I have tolerated your impudence from time to time in the past, but it is beginning to grate on me and bore me. You may be immortal in a manner of speaking, but I assure you that I can end your worthless little life in an instant.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” she hissed.
“Really? Why?”
“You’d be all alone again in your little hole with nobody interesting to torment.”
The Dark’s visage twisted with wry disdain. “You are not interesting.”
It dropped her and stalked back into the shadows, leaving Hail to the unenviable task of trying to breathe through an aching throat.
She was not going to return to New Rahvin. That was absolutely out of the question. That was where Bryn was, and no doubt he had moved on, same as Elise and the others had.
She found herself a prisoner of the place she had wanted nothing more than to leave, locked out of the dark source of magic which animated her, prevented a simple release like death, and somehow removed from the rest of the world.
