touch

Through mazéd darkness she has lost herself.  All direction forfeit as in a torrent of water, turned and upended.  All she knows is onward, away from the hands that hate her.  With drops of blood she marks her trail, using scent to never return.  Onward, to escape.  Time? What is time?  Ever and complete night is her way.  Never pausing to listen, never to rest, she climbs and falls.

Rocks, ancient and cold, by these she is surrounded.  They are her path, they are her grave.  She casts aside thoughts of the never-seen around her: what creeps and crawls beside.  Her body screams in pain and blood, but she does not answer.  She must escape those who seek her life.  If only they sought her death, she would surrender.  But it is her life they would steal.  Run.  Fly.

She mistakes the growing warmth for numbness.  In her stumbles she notes not the gentled way.  But she falls.  In dust.  She is at her end.  Her mind slips and faints.  All her enemies threaten to trample her mind.  The flood seizes and breaks and she sinks.  Falling and falling.  Not to rest but to fire.  Overwhelming, hurt and rage.  Encompassed, consumed.  The end.

And then the rock speaks.  "Blood of Blood."  And a crack and a quake.  Light.  First a thread, but it stretches, it expands.  Her closed eyes taste the water of day.  A door has opened.  A cascade of light finds her.  In a bed of dust and blood, she feels the sun through her cloud of agony.  This call of day brings her to climb once more.  A far greater task.  Through the cliffs of her fear, her agony.  From the cliff of death she climbs now.  The sun to guide her.  She does not stir from her body's rest, but she endures the hardest struggle of her life.  Upwards.  Not to relent.  Upwards.  And she breathes, dust in sunlight.  She... slowly... shifts her arm to lift herself.  Now in place she braces.

And a gentle touch rests itself upon her arm.