Rescue

by Helen

…again, Fisable.

A voice - strangely familiar as she began to surface from the dark, haunted space behind her eyes - and then the lightning, pouring through her, searing and healing, melding chain back to bone and knitting twisted flesh. She gasped, coughed, pulling air into raw and bloodied lungs; tried to sit up. Her head was jerked back suddenly by the hair as she kneeled, swaying. Black silk and pale skin - Selena? No - then the hand was knocked away, and the shouting started.

She pushed herself to a crouch, up from the frozen ground, and everything was wrong. (Everything is always wrong.) Especially when you've just woken up. (Where the hell are you?) Get some distance. Just enough to think.

She started to speak, blinking the nightmares from her eyes, and realised she'd seen this before - or the same play, with different actors. The clothes, the voices. Carmina - Yana - Sebastian (he was always there) - but who was this young fellow? His voice - hideously familiar - but that halting stutter was clearly not the confident hiss she'd heard just before waking. Another dream. She shook her head, twitched, twitched again, started to back off. Where is he? (You can feel him. He's close.) Just need to get a little distance…

How many times now? It was always the same - old companions or new, the usual group of rag-tag White City gutterscum adventurers, they'd appear - rescue her - somehow - improbably - take her away. (North. Away. Safe.) Then they'd turn, and smile, and twist, and she'd slowly pick up the details - wrong clothes, wrong voices, faces slightly out of true. Scars mirrored, left-handed when they should be right. Just another vision. (Just another trick.) How long have I been here now? No! She'd escaped the Port long ago. Fal-Kar and Serafine had come for her. (That was just another dream. You never left.) How long before these, too, turned into monsters and illusions? (He's coming.) No! I am free!

The argument in her head was drowning out the others' voices. She was backing away purely on instinct now, and Carmina - this strange not-Carmina, dressed in black with the Brethren's emblem on her breast (It's a trick, it's a trap, he's close…)- was coming after her, murder etched on her face. No! I got out! This is real! (They're not who they seem. He's coming.) She stumbled back another step, and the Light-Priest's hand shot out with unholy speed, grabbing her by the collar.

Kit froze, and the panic seized control. Her eyes rose automatically, ready to shatter, ready to destroy the threat– and met empty, blackened sockets, staring blankly out at her. (He's here.) She fought to regain herself as Sebastian started shouting and ranting and the others milled around in confusion, but the terror was too strong - she couldn't move - no matter what she tried, her limbs wouldn't respond, she couldn't twist or duck to try to break the hold, paralysed by the Priest's hand at her throat (his hand at her throat).

She tried to draw breath through the iron bands of fear squeezing her chest– (Pray it's over quickly this time so you can hide again.)– and then there was a crunch of pain at the back of her head and she was falling, back into the blessed warm dark. (He can't find you if you hide behind your eyes.)

When she came round, she pretended to believe her false memories of Bound Ones and the Red Gryphon and this Velasquez youth; and she did largely as the visions told her. She remembered all too clearly what happened when she resisted.