On the Precipice [Izzy Bennet/Day 4/Open]

For a time, a short time to others and a very long to here, there is nothing. Not light or honeysuckle, no canons or feathered wings. Then, gradually, there is pressure across her ribs propelling her forward and a slightly breeze lifts her greasy hair and tattered goassmer uniform, and there is a step and another and somehow she keeps putting the same foot on them --

“You’ll be ok,” she hears as though under water --

And the water flows through her, out of her, cascading down her dirt-stained cheeks, making them anew.

Eventually Izzabel - Izzy - deposits her against the stones. “What’s up there?” The other girl wonders but Baby cannot catch her breath, cannot make it past the next big heaving sob --

Kristof is dead and the last tether of home has snapped --

Baby wrapped her arms around her head, crying into the crooks of her elbows. It is damp and humid and somehow both loud and silent. She heaves. She sobs. The tears fall even though she hasn't had enough to drink in many days.

Izzy, at her side, falls in another way. The Tower gives her no purchase, allows her no passage. Twice she fails while Baby is cocooned in her grief. With night approaching, Baby slowly, slowly, slowly runs out of tears.

When she's exhausted every ounce of liquid, she hiccups and drops her arms.

“How can I support you right now?”

Baby leans against the Tower, her good leg forcing her upright. "Let's -" hiccup "let's try to -" hiccup "get to the - "

Hiccup. Hiccup. Hiccup.

She points upward and then makes good on the intention and begins to climb, one leg be damned.

Izzy laughed and it eased something in Baby's chest. The devastating hiccups subsided and she felt a new energy coursing through what was left of her body. She found a handhold, then another. She pulled herself up the Tower brick by brick, hauling her mangled lower half.

Part way, panting, she paused to look down... Only to see Izzy still firmly on the ground. “What do you see up there?”

A streak of gold and the beating of wings hummed like a cloud overhead. "Something beautiful!" She shouted down.

Baby blinks and suddenly Izzy is at her side. Atop the Tower the breeze is cool and the arena seems very far away. She's carefully sorted her things while Izzy climbed. "I found something..." she whispers away from the wind's grasp. With little more than a drop and a scrap of green left, Baby tilts her Chalice with one hand and wraps her other arm around her cold, aching, greying ribcage.

She wants to say more but the shafts of sunlight have begun to turn her hair gold.

She reaches out to squeeze Izzy's hand once with her newly laced gloves, and then falls backward. Her Pegasus Mount catches her mid-air and off they wing to a new adventure...