AN: I don't know either. Will turn into actual story, promise; just reminiscence for now. And also brain mutilation.
It begins with a quiet rasping from the great maw of the ground. It opens wide after a long, long time; it waits, before then, for what feels like years. Time bends around the opening, or so it seems. Ravenously it yawns out its hunger, and breathes revenge into the air around it. The tendrils and coils of poisoned air reach to lace around the buildings on the coast nearest the wound; it doesn't take long to slither into the city, sinking as any innocent fog could have. She chokes and gags, but it's not the first time.
This time of night or morning is not welcoming to most. The sun doesn't ever quite permeate the clouds; there's only enough to cast weak shadows, long and strange under the incandescence of street-lamps. Orange moonlight still stakes its claim this early. She remembers vaguely that it was blue once- a thin kind of blue, like something else she's almost tempted to remember. Certainly not the lurid glow of Zydrate. Maybe Mag's eyes.
She wanders, searching for nothing in particular, except a way to answer the call that keeps trying to claim her. There was never anyone to tell her stories of the worlds beyond Sanitarium and the wasted mainland. She never constructed her own. Only the sea ever had a way to bring that instinct back, and all it makes her want to do is drown; the sea, surrounding the island, surrounded by the mass graves that used to count for continents. It sings.
There isn't anything left to wait for. Her father's dead, as of last night; the funerals are all being planned by the underlings. He's nowhere to be found and she finds herself not quite able to care, though withdrawal rings through her ears and shatters her thoughts halfway through when she tries to follow them back to where he would be. (Her mother never had a funeral; she drowned, instead. The body was never found, and her father was grateful for it, saying she ran away with some handsomer man as if her child hadn't known the truth.)
Mental illness was never something that could be wished away. It was, however, something that could be cut away, by the time Amber was close enough to mindful maturity that it began to show itself; that was her first memory of the drug, after all. They gave it to her after the lobotomy, and it kept her quiet. Her first surgery, the first step to Perfection, not of the body but the mind.
She's in the odd position of knowing exactly what she's missing. She's missing memory, and missing love, and missing grief that she knows very well should be there now if it ever could be. She doesn't miss her mother, and she doesn't miss her father; the dead are dead, and she lets them bury themselves. Bodies are nothing more than meat for the market.
The salt air stings her eyes, her bare skin, and the unlaced wounds. She leaves them open tonight; it's only a trip to the shore, after all. Not going anywhere to be seen. No point in marring this moment of respite. She'll take over tomorrow; now there are scars to wash, to cleanse, to close at last. The vendetta isn't over; her agony is.