Sweet Child o' Mine
Violet forced her eyes open and found her vision to be dark and blurred, she blinked several times as her eyelids felt glued shut. It wasn't until she squeezed her eyes shut tight that warm tears formed and opened them again that she could start to see. What she saw in front of her was her Ma.
Ma was an imposing woman. The figure she cut was tall and broad shouldered, with her golden hair long and braided. The braid itself only to be cut once she bore a Son for her husband as a sacrifice in thanks for her blessing. Yet that braid ran down her back as the years passed and the young bride with her child of sin continued to grow her braid for years upon years, and no masculine child came of it. It became a shameful reminder and that's how Violet remembered her Ma, a touch of Crow's feet to once bright blue eyes, while admonishing Violet for letting sin take hold of her heart.
And as Violet's eyes adjusted, the person in front of her changed, it was Aisha trying her best to be seductive inside the tiny quarters of Whittle's place. The way her Imp kept suppressing her grin as she felt just as silly as she looked undressing and sauntering the few feet to the bed. The nervous look on her face after their first attempts to arrange their bodies without hurting Violet's leg. This memory of their first night together played on a dark crystal surface in an endless open world she woke up in after being shot.
If she died coming to Gimel and Aisha was her angel then this place was her hell. Everything hurt, her head, her brains from puzzling through too many data points, and her side from taking the fall. Violet could hardly take a deep breath and shallow ones were barely tolerable to take. She was broken inside and it was her own fool's fault for ignoring Aisha's words, for giving into her drive of being a hero. Now she was hurt, lost, and her power told her nothing was as it seemed and danger was everywhere.
Violet focused her thoughts away from the pain. Her stepfather said if she was breathing she was alive and if she was alive then she should focus on what was most important. The sentiment was she could pray for healing and strength but she was going to use her power on herself - assess the damage, and find the right way to get up. Find the right way to take the first step. And finally find the right way to get back to the world.
This ground of the underworld pulsed with threads of light when she used her power, and the damage she sustained to the side of her head from the gunshot and the fall made her eye and ear just barely north of useless. Her eyepatch was unnecessary, save for covering up some of the damage and keeping debris out of her wounded eye. Wouldn't be the first time she screwed up and was left on her own in a strange place.
That what started her on this path to begin with, made the mistake of pouring out her heart and lost everything. Now she's not in an actual hell but it was a lot of trouble of her own making. As much as her power was a help for taking care of others it was a crutch to surviving dealing with people. It could give her answers to questions she had no experience with, beyond survival training and fighting, lessons from the Bible - she modeled her time as Loadstone's Marshal on Solomon doing her best to be fair and equal in the laws the miners and their folk voted on. But when she used her power for herself, for the selfish parts of her soul, it was beautiful or destructive.
She used her powers on the phone call with Imp and the world cracked apart a little more. Called on her power on the road to the Wardens and a thousand thousand thoughts wracked her brain the entire fall as she was blind the entire fall. Something in her brain disconnected from her sight and her power colored in the darkness with a living image so abstract it could have been cracked paint on an old house. Then she passed out before the impact, just a complete overload of her power. But here she limped along, one step at a time, taking a few seconds to catch her breath then moving step by step skirting edges of massive divides that became a mountain's summit by the time she made it past the dangerous part.
It felt so strange that when her sight could fix on the sky above there were tears opening up to show the actual sky. If the Elders had been alive to see this they would cite scripture and their own prophecies, words spoken to keep their flocks in line. But it was awe inspiring and terrifying as reality instead of just a fire and brimstone speech, yet the pain snapped her back to her current predicament.
Pulses of light.
She uses her power and light pulses in threads.
With eyes shut she lets her brain filter out the pain, the pounding of her blood in her ears, slowly the eye floaters and bursts of colors on the black spanse of her vision give way to the lighted threads. Her power makes the threads of light become a map, the map is knowledge of what she is thinking about her focus of her power.
Violet thought of the people of Loadstone, of Whittle, and the threads scatter across the underworld. She thought of home and the threads changed and pointed her up and out. She thought of Aisha and a sob caught in her throat as the map remained the same.
With resolve she limped along her lighted path.
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