I lay in the hospital bed, next to my dying father. We both lay in silence, hoping against hope that Panacea would come. Logically, there was no reason why she shouldn't. My dad was horrifically injured, I was in terrible health, and the last Endbringer attack had been a week ago. The doctors couldn't help us, but surely she would?
And so, we waited, exchanging mumbled words. I told him about the bullying, in some sort of vain attempt to keep him alive on rage or something. The day became night, and dad's breathing grew ever more ragged. Eventually, I fell asleep.
A dying creature fell towards the world. The world fell towards a thousand thousand stars of diamond that fell apart. The sky was filled with lightning, shards of crystal raining endlessly down in gold and silver light.
I was a vast creature, with an endless maw, and I ate the stars out of the sky, drank up the seas and cracked planets like eggs to get at the warmth below. I felt myself shatter. I saw the knife descend into my chest. My last thoughts before I died were how lonely the other one would be...
When I awoke, my father was dead. The dream I had was sticking in my head like an icicle, giving me the mother of all headaches. I looked silently at dad's corpse, and tried to get myself to cry. Instead, I just felt a vague numbness crystallize into a heavy weight on my heart and mind. I didn't even notice that my own injuries had scabbed over silver, nor did I remember how I got home that day.
The next days passed as a blur. The funeral was another frozen thorn in my mind. I refused to leave the house, until the police came and pulled me away, gently leading me down and out. I stayed with various dockworkers' families, and drifted through school. The trio said things, but it was so hard to focus, or think, or really do anything at all.
The blurring passed sometimes. This was one of those times. I was standing on a road, facing a fight between the Hounds of Darkness and the ABB. The Hounds had been a new gang whose first move had been to shut down the Merchants hard. The ABB were the most feared faction in the city, a reputation due entirely to Lung.
A bullet came towards me, a blur among thousands, and I nudged it aside with my silver-nailed finger. What was I doing? Oh right, Lacey had asked me to get something from the Association Office. Which was on the other side of the fight. I sighed, and walked forward through the fight. I tried to keep the bullets away from my clothes - it wouldn't do to get them torn, I didn't have Emma's infinite wardrobe. I had to catch some of the bullets, which stung my hands a bit, but then I was clear of the fight...
Lung's arm smashed into me and threw me back to where I had started. I stared at the dark sky for a bit, then sat up again. "Look." I grumbled. "I just need to get something from that office." Lung roared and crashed into me. I stopped him dead with one hand, shunting the excess energies into the Funerary Thorn as I had come to call it. It wasn't like the Crown Thorn, and needed the energy more.
I glared at Lung, pushed him aside and walked through the frozen fight. When I came back that way, with Lacey's package in hand, the fight was over, with only some spatters of blood and bullet casings as a sign. Beyond the obvious gouges and scorchmarks from the cape fight, of course.
Clarity came again when Emma said something truly dreadful. I dropped my act of being hut, and examined her curiously for a moment. Then I buried the school in the silence of a funeral mass, and walked away, a new thorn in my mind. Such a small thing compared to the other two, but what to call it? Names were important. Somebody tried to yelp as they failed to get out of my way and were sent crashing into the ground. The silence swallowed that sound.
Silent Thorn? No, silence was part of the Funerary Thorn. Thorn of Betrayal? Traitor Thorn? Too close to Emma. She didn't deserve to be remembered in a Thorn. I sighed at the difficulty of naming the little thing. Without a name, it was completely useless, merely eating what little energy I could spare it.
Then again, I did need a weapon of some sort, and unlike the other two which were Thorns because they pierced me this was a Thorn because it was all sharp edges and gray colours.
The Ashen Thorn? That... fit. And so it was named as I walked out of the school for the last time. The gate was closed, but a nudge with my new weapon cut the chain that was somewhat futilely holding it closed and I went out to see the sea. I think it calmed me. Lacey wanted me to go to the bank today, to fetch some other documents.