Breaking Point

written for the TPE's Halloween Challenge 1.


"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." -Stephen King


It isn't merely the dark that scares Sandry. With the dark comes the uncanny loudness of her thoughts, bouncing around the silent room. With the dark comes the monsters that she had shoved back into the recesses of her soul, the ones that threaten to claw their way out on her bad days. With the dark comes fear, fear that everyone and everything she loves would die and leave her alone, fear that she would amount to nothing in this world, fear that she'd be bitter and powerless, or even worse, bitter and powerful.

She has reason to fear these things, because her fears are bearing fruit.

She doesn't quite like the person she'd become, not really. Her cornflower blue eyes glint with cold hatred rather than sheer determination; she holds the few that she loves closely, too closely.

But it's too difficult trying to change . She tries to find the old Sandry, the one who was light-hearted, the one who loved the light and the simple beauty of things. But that Sandry is gone, forced back by contracts and marriage and the Namorn court.

You can't be soft and naïve in Namorn. Not in Berenene's court, and especially not as Fin's wife.

Sandry sighs, and rolls back over to face her husband. Shadows dance upon his cheeks, his eyelashes flutter…watchful even in sleep, Sandry thinks.

Maybe she could have loved him in time, maybe if she had chosen him of her own free will…but she didn't. He had locked her in the dark, in a prison in the dark, stripped of her magic, and she hates him.

Would kill him if she could.

Instead, she settles for the petty things, like barely veiled insults at Caidy, like hiding Briar's contraception herbs, like "accidentally" walking in on Daja and Rizu, like reading Tris's most prized books and then leaving them too close to the fire.

She wants her friends to scream at her, to scold her and tell her that no, not everything was all right. But they don't. They merely look away, or pretend not to care. They pity her, she knows that. She doesn't want their pity. She wants their hatred. Because if they hate her, if they don't love her anymore, she has nothing to lose.

And then she can let the monsters win.