A/N ~ This was the hardest thing I ever had to write. I now hate myself for it. And I cried the whole time I wrote this. So it'd better be worth it.
Madness.
As a word, so easily pushed away, locked in the dark like a forgotten dragon. As a form, almost a living, breathing force of its own. Madness consumes, yet madness is often a subtle strike. You don't understand madness until it devours you, pushes you to breaking point and then further, and when it does… well, you don't even know its there.
Morgana Pendragon
Early in her abruptly ended life madness only ever occurred to her in word form.
Then her 'parents' died when she was too young for such sorrow. Old enough to understand snatches, and yet still young enough to be denied the entire full truth. So even before madness came calling, her childhood was marred
Then, so many years later, the first hints of true madness came knocking, in the form of a vase, a candle, a window, and a curtain.
After that nothing else really mattered. Nothing but the fear. Madness took intrigue. When Morgana sobbed herself to sleep, or thought on how wrong and guilty and evil and intrusive she felt in her own life, madness gained curiosity, and when she gazed out of the window, and thought how easy it would be to throw herself down, and make it all stop hurting, madness sensed an opening. When nobody noticed her deterioration but a servant, madness claws began to dig in. And when that servant killed her, it would have carried her away.
Had she not been granted a way out.
When you work yourself into such a state of lie that you fear for nonexistent secrets, such fear that it seems home, and happiness just a place for brief visits, and then you are given a way out; you take it. No matter what it is or what it requires you take it.
Morgause was her way out.
So her sister fended madness away for a while. Then she watched that same sister die on a stone table, with her blood drying on her knife.
But no, what followed was not madness.
Bitterness, anger, and all-consuming sadness, yes, but a far cry from insanity. The hints of madness were woken once more when the Sarrum found her.
And they kindled so, flames of madness devouring everything she was, everything she had been, ad everything she had yet to become.
Two years is a long time.
Madness had already left the subtlest of hooks in her.
The days and nights began to blur into one another, in impossible darkness. She talked aloud for sanity, clung to images of Arthur dead, the Sarrum dead. That was all that kept her sane. For a while.
She began to starve shortly. Malnourishment opens all kinds of doors for madness, and when you're fed on crusts of mould and 'what the dogs left', and most of that given to Aithusa, malnourishment doesn't really get any worse.
Aithusa. Aithusa was her light. Her one remaining ray of light. And she watched the ray of light began to deform, to twist and torture herself, crushing Morgana, and it became just another pain. A deeper one, a much deeper one. The only thing Morgana had left to love was begging for death. Soon, Morgana would be too.
Abuse does wonders for the deterioration of sanity. And freezing and starving in the darkness with only sounds of torture, in that pit, Morgana Pendragon experienced every kind of abuse there was, and then more. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, mental abuse, and abuse Morgana didn't even have names for.
Slowly, she forgot all happiness she had ever felt, little enough that it was. Any gentle touch or comfort. She forgot what sunlight was
The only thing that kept her alive was Aithusa. Of course she would let the Sarrum do whatever he wanted to her, for Aithusa's welfare.
Soon she clung to dreams of the Sarrum begging for death as she did. And Arthur. Because Arthur had to be in league wit this monster, didn't he?
The life drained from her with the sanity.
And that's the funny thing about madness. You don't know when you're truly lost to it, but when you are, really, entirely devoured by it, there's no going back.