AN: A rewrite of something I wrote a few years ago. AU-ish where Raistlin is tortured in the Abyss. (We all know he deserved it!)
Crysania once met a blind man who told her that his other four senses were stronger because of it. He could hear, smell, feel and taste better then a regular person; his body's way of making up for his lack of sight.
Crysania knew it would be like this for her too. For now though, there is an eternity of bruises and scrapes as she stumbles onto unseen objects/She did not ask Paladine to heal these; she deserved them. The cleric understood the poetic justice of her blindness, she could not truly see until she was blind, yes, but still it is hard to live.
For instance, there is the momentary flash of panic ever day when she woke, and her commended her eyes open,only to realize that that where; trying to adjust to the omnipresent darkness, closed eyes, or not. And there is the shame of being lead by someone or the risk of falling, if she walks by herself.
Sight is even gone from her dreams. All they are now is a voice, his voice, coiling around her, whispering all the lies that she believed so long ago.
And there are little losses, like the fact that she will never see the stars again. Crysania was never fond of black and now, shrouded in a never ending night, except when she turns her face towards the sun to see a brighter darkness, her opinion of this color has not improved.
All of this is almost as bad as the way people treat her. As if she were some holy martyr who lost her sight in a heroic struggle against evil, a paragon of goodness. Or, like yesterday, when she lost her way in the temple she had known for years and had to beg help from a passing young acolyte.
"Have you really been to the Abyss? Was it dark?" She could imagine the girl staring up at her with breathless fascination. But how could she explain that it was not only dark, but that the darkness contained all the horror of night, a shifting, changing chaos that stared back?
"Yes, it was very dark," She had replied, which, no doubt, allowed the girl to go back to her companions and tell them, "Ha! She said it was dark! I told you!"
Her memories grew dimmer everyday, as her mind forgot what it was like to see. She did not regret everything that slips away. While she clung to some of the increasingly blurry images, she longed to forget others. Such as Raistlin. He is dead and she could leave him behind, or so she told herself again and again.
Yet, for the sake of argument, if she did see the Master of the Past and Present again, what would she say? A phrase she heard a carriage driver yell at a pedestrian blocking the road comes to mind and she smiles. Part of Crysania has forgiven him and the other half longs to break his golden nose.
But, in all seriousness, she thought, as she sat in her room, facing the window. It was summer and the sun was hot on her face. She could still enjoy its warmth if not its light. I would tell him I forgive him and then tell him to get out of my- then the irony of he expression hit her like a wave and she laughed, aloud to herself in her chamber, laughed for the first time in months- sight.
Instead of day and night in the Abyss, there was agony and there is death for Raistlin. That is the only way to divide it; he was alive and he was in pain, or he was dead and he was not. And sometimes, in that night, there were dreams. They were tiny pinpricks of light in the abysmal darkness. They were strange dreams, lacking that impossible, surreal quality but he could not think what else to call them.
Raistlin remembered the first one clearly; it was Crysania, the first time he saw her as beautiful, in Istar. It was so foreign, to him, the recollection, because he had forgotten that things existed besides the pain and the goddess who inflicted it.
Istar seemed a thousand years ago and yet he remembered, clinging to the remembrance the dream had brought. When he woke to life, the pain was easier that day.
Raistlin suspected these were not imagined dreams, but glimpses into the present world. If that was true, then she is alive and head of Paladine's Clerics, but she is blind.
Crysania. Always the dreams are of her. He has seen her dictating a letter, praying to Paladine, praying for him, at public ceremonies, and helping the poor, the sick, and, the dying. Once he called out to her, but it seemed if he was indeed seeing reality, he saw it only as an invisible, silent observer.
Not every vision is good. He saw her slowly adjusting to the horrible lose of her sight; watched her drop a glass and cut her hands groping about for the pieces, too pround- even now- to call for help.
Raistlin wondered what god deigned to send theses visions, perhaps Paladine, or Lunitari- remembering the small boy who had called out to her such a long time ago. He had wondered why the protagonist in them never varied; wondered all this during his days of pain and nights of death, punctuated by the occasional star of a dream.