Aris, Daughter of Moon, wandered the dense dark forests while drooling green liquid from her mouth. She couldn’t stop vomiting from the pain. It came in horrible rolling waves right in the eye sockets and made her skull creak from pressure.

She could see, but it was some strange dark world that she saw. Her new eyes were the crystallized gemstone rocks that were in the face of the Being in Smoke, or Doran as the Munna knew him as. He was a Part, one who called himself Heel. Three different names that seemed to describe three different people but they were one and the same.

Who cares what he was called? She killed him. She took his eyes and watched the light of his Solute flicker out. She had killed a fucking god. A fresh wave of pain seared through her head and she screamed, splashing green liquid from her mouth that would not stop leaking. Her saliva came out as glittering green with her new vision and splashed down on her clothes and stained the forest floor. It defined the dirt ground below her as she couldn’t quite see things properly, only herself and whatever the green liquid was she was spitting out.

She must have blacked out several times, waking up confused on the ground. But the pain would always return and she would continue walking aimlessly. It was like wandering in pitch blackness, punctuated with glowing lights with no context of depth of distance. More than once Aris became dizzy with the strangeness of things that seemed close yet far, things with from yet without. She eventually thought she should vomit just so she had some reference point of her surroundings. If only she could focus.

But focusing made the pain worse, like digging fingers into an open wound. Occasionally she could see familiar shapes but she soon realized these were dreams of when she inevitably blacked out on the forest floor. Often they were dreams about people she’d sworn she’s never seen before, in places she’s never been. Aris wondered if they were dreams from the Part’s eyes.

Once she saw a woman primly dressed in Kuvanian clothing, sitting on a low stool and eating a bowl of stew. Aris then saw a street full of dirty urchin children, some of them running around and begging for food. She saw a hand etch out runes in stone with charcoal. She saw much and understood nothing. Every time her vision darkened back to the confusing dark world and she would wake up on the ground.

For what felt like days she wandered while blindly groping around her surroundings. Her hand felt sore being torn on the thorns of branches and rough bark. She lost her shoes at one point and her feet were equally sore and painful. The pain in both her hands and feet paled in comparison to what felt like burning coals in her eye sockets.

On some days she thought she could make out her surroundings. As if she could somehow make out a faint shadow of the trees and the ground, she could somehow take a few steps without running into something. But when she tried to concentrate a little too hard, it would hurt too much to continue.

It was like being hit in the face every time it happened. It was beyond maddening - it was torture. It was enough for her to consider ripping the damn things out of her face. At one point she definitely thought that being completely and utterly blind was better than whatever this existence was.

But then some sort of wildlife would skitter by and Aris realized that she could see it. Not as a squirrel or rodent or whatever else scurried around on the forest floors and trees, but as little globs of light. Trying to focus on them was like trying to see the Shades back at the Academy. The working hypothesis of her mind still hysterical from pain was that she was seeing Solute.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

It was enough for her to keep going.

Aris found that she couldn’t tell if it was night or day so she didn’t know how much time passed. There was no food or water but she spent most of her time just trying not to hurt that she didn’t really think about how hungry or thirsty she was. She was just struggling to exist.

The second thing that kept her going was that every time she woke up on the ground, those moments of painlessness grew longer and longer. It got to the point where she could get up and walk a few steps before being overwhelmed again. Was this progress? Did that mean she would eventually feel fine again? Or was it simply because she was getting used to the pain that she had begun to block it out?

Aris didn’t care. She wanted to just stop hurting. She cried for her brother, for her parents, for Nilda and Rask. The dark world careened in her misery and left her lying on the cold floor as she pathetically writhed on it as if it would relieve the pain. It did not. It only kept hurting and hurting until she blacked out again. There was no end to the nightmare, no end to the pain. She would wake up, thinking it’s finally over just to suffer again.

She heard the voices before she could bear to open her eyes. Two male voices, both speaking standard Gaian. She groggily tried to focus on them and felt the rough bark against her back - she was sitting up against a tree.

“Parts have mercy, what did they do to you?” one of the voices asked in a hushed whisper.

“Is that Yscian blood?” the other asked, voice awed. “Do they bleed that color?”

“I don’t know but I won’t be surprised if they do,” the first said. “Hey girl, you alive? Did you cut off some barbarian heads over there?”

With great effort she peeled her eyes open. One of the voices shouted in shock and she could hear the sounds of them scrambling away.

“Parts fucking damn it!! Look what they did to her eyes!” the second voice nearly screamed.

“Shut the fuck up,” the first said angrily. “Do you want them to come after us too?”

“We should get outta here before that happens,” the second voice whimpered. “Tell Delnnir what happened, maybe - ”

“Delnnir ain’t going to believe a single word we say,” the first voice scoffed. “We gotta get this girl back with us. Then I’m sure he’ll believe what we say.”

“What - are you mad? How do you know she ain’t a Yscian or some shit?”

“Are you stupid? Look at her hair and skin, how in Part’s name is she a Yscian?” the first voice snapped. “Now shut up. Girl, can you stand? Girl?”

Moon-curse it they were annoying. But Aris didn’t have the energy to tell them to stop calling her ‘girl’. She didn’t even have the energy to stand any more.

“We’re gonna have to carry her,” the first voice said.

“Are you kidding? She stinks up to the Parts-damn sun,” the second said. “And what if she’s diseased or something? And what about - ”

“Alright, shut up,” the first voice snapped. “I’ll carry her. But if you run off without me when the Yscians come after us I’ll kill you.”

The dark world spun at a nauseating rate after that. She was pressed up against a body and was jostled as whoever the first voice belonged to carried her somewhere. When she touched the unknown man’s back, she found that she could focus more easily on a glowing spot in her world of darkness. Touching a person made their solute easily visible to her. Aris held the image in her mind and slowly, ever so slowly, she could see it.

With the Heel’s eyes, she could see people’s solute. When the pain brought a different kind of darkness again, this time it simply brought her relief. She was going to make it. She wished the Part could see her now.

Well, maybe it still could.