Keep Ya Head Up [wendihoes day 1]

INES IZAR.

I’m under no illusion that I should be dead. My name beckons me to the basement of the lodge we’d been brought to, a deep cellar where all the light had been sucked into. I feel pain, but it’s not the sharp, biting sting I had expected to endure when the war began. It’s a dull, droning throbbing that permeates every heavy step I take through the thick snow. There’s a splatter of blood on my left shoe that camouflages into the amber leather so well I can almost believe it’s part of the pattern. Almost. But I know better. I shudder for a multitude of reasons.

The cold is relentless. Artificial, manufactured by kings and queens with malice in their heart, it blows straight through me. Running exhausts my lungs, but it keeps my blood warm. As I slow to a hurried walk, I cling tightly to the bundle of woolen fleece I’d scavenged from the lodge, stroking the soft fabric tenderly. Like a baby taking to a soft toy, I find comfort in the simplicity of this thing I get to call mine.

Maggie is not one of these things, yet I still run to her like a lifeline when she comes into view, hunched in the snow and bleeding out. I see Azure in her place – a girl I barely knew, but a girl who saw something in me and misplaced her faith. Maybe that got her killed. I hope it isn’t, though. I don’t want to be the reason for any more hurt.

It’s running again, like I’ve been running all day. I don’t realise the vulnerable position I’ve put myself in until Maggie whirls on me with a raised sword and a deep ferocity in her eyes. Visions of loyalty lost and being run right through flood my senses, and I have the common sense to scramble away from her until she registers who the timid girl swaddled in cotton wool is, and lowers her weapon.

She sighs. She tries on a smile; I try to match it.

“You good?” I nod. Know we’re both lying to ourselves that we’re anything other than fine.

“You were... you were great up there. Seriously. I don’t think anyone was expecting you to hang in there with me like that."

The howl of the wind mutes her voice. In the blizzard, she sounds gentler than I remember in the training centre, even when the bluntness of her words hits me squarely in the jaw. It shouldn’t hurt to be unremarkable. And yet.

“I just wanted to help.”

And, “I didn’t want you to be alone.”

Because I didn’t want to be alone, either.

And I might tell her that it feels like my fault that Azure’s not with us right now, too, but I’m not the girl who goes looking for sympathy. Something tells me Maggie isn’t the girl to give it out – that I’m already pushing my luck with her half compliment, half pep talk, half assessment of my mediocrity. So I let the frosty air swirling around us fill in the silence instead as I slowly slink forward and crouch in the snow with her. I let my fingers go numb, to the point they warm again, as I sift through the sludge. We stay there until we can’t bear the cold any longer and move to our feet to seek some sort of shelter.

“Wait...” Hand in hand, Maggie reaches for me as I pause on the ascent, ears straining through the white noise. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe that vivid imagination of mine has finally broken too far free. But I ask the question anyway. “Do you hear that?”

picking up items!
aaaand rolling for a familiar!! <3

3FeW86ba|I1-15