She knew, now. She knew everything.
She was Anna. She was a witch - formerly of hedges and earth, now of curses and the depths of despair. The one who had chased her, who had torn free her Heart, was her familiar. Her second familiar; Shibey had eaten her first. She'd made a decision. She hadn't known what it would mean.
Her body tensed a bit, as if expecting pain, a twist of the gut, a clench of the heart, but there was nothing. Anna regarded her Self, her litany of memory, impassively. In this white void there was no pain, no suffering. She could be her truest self here, and read her own past like a book. Distant, academic. Clinical. Ancient history. She would float here forever-
- no -
A thread of blackness appeared, and she shied from it on instinct; there, there was the squeeze of pain in her stomach, the reaction she'd been expecting and hadn't braced for, not this time. The thread expanded, twisting and growing into a door, stark and seemingly sharp-edged against infinite white. The keyhole gaped like a mouth, like a promise. A way out. A return.
... To what? Anna turned away from the door, but she felt its presence still, and everything that she had regarded so serenely, so neatly, felt jumbled and ragged in her mind. Her previously ordered thoughts were now in disarray, and the distance she'd maintained was vanishing fast.
She'd been so stupid. Her eyes filled with tears as she felt herself - her younger self, her foolish self - innocently agree to the Incubator's pact, seeking power, so that she'd finally be someone her family could truly be proud of, as if love weren't enough all on its own- she felt Erasmus die again as Shibey crunched the mouse familiar in his jaws;
the jaws, bladed, closed over her Heart; she screamed;
-she felt her connection to the earth, her source of magic, begin to wither and die within her, that connection that was so faint compared to others but still vital, that she hadn't thought she could live without. Light, greenery, and the ancient pulse of life buried deep and slow - gone, eroded away and killed by the taint that Shibey had brought to touch her spirit and her body. She felt the maelstrom of darkness kindle within her, a whirling edged thing that she couldn't touch without feeling utterly lost;
the hands reached for her, stretched for her desperately, but they cracked to ash as soon as she touched them;
- the school, so strange and filled with things she hadn't expected, that she couldn't understand; beasts that frightened her and ghouls that tried to rearrange her life, visions of the past and flickers of someone else's life and death, tales of Hunters as more than bedtime stories, a man in a white coat;
the body lay on the table; the woman touched it, flickering and stuttering as the tape played;
- flame-touched kisses, a desperate sense of grounding herself in another person, small though he may be, because he'd wanted her and so she'd chosen him, and despite everything he made her happy because she'd chosen him;
she chose to get back on the glider, to catapult into the unknown one. more. time;
- pink frills and white fur and chases and classes and the ground shaking under Sura's feet and Chaya's barking and Belladonna's bright laughter and Freya's too-tight hugs and TG's squeezes and her Heart had to be worth something because they'd all seen something worth their time in her, beneath the taint spreading over her skin, the curse overwhelming her even as she lost her foundation and fell;
she fell, she landed, she touched the Blessing;
She touched the Door.
She understood, even as the pain of it screamed through her. She could give it up. She could forget. Everything that hurt her, gone in an instant, wounds healed as if they'd never been. It would all just vanish, and never hurt her again. She didn't have to carry it any longer. She could be as she had been in the Realm of the Goddesses - unsullied. Pure.
But she had to choose.
She felt tears trace down her cheeks as she kept her hands on the Door - there was pain there, yes, but also gratitude. Shibey had only offered her the illusion of a choice; the school had been forced on her by a family who wanted her gone. Everything that had shaped her life the most powerfully had been someone else's decision.
But this choice, the choice to shape her memory so completely, was hers and hers alone.
Anna took a deep, shaking breath. "Thank you," she whispered, pressing her hands against the Door as hard as she could. "Thank you." And she knew, in her heart - her Heart - what her choice had to be.
Her Heart was worth something. She couldn't leave that behind.
She couldn't leave them behind.
"I-I'm coming," she breathed, then gasped at the pain of it, like a knife in her chest, but she pressed forward and pushed, pushed, pushed-
- leaving nothing behind.
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