Title: Shattered Hopes
Summary: A lone survivor of a pirate raid, Sandry finds no reason to go on.
Warnings: Character death, rape reference.
Disclaimer: Not mine! All I own are the plot, my CD's, my player, and my trumpet. And someone took my player!
Thanks to: The people at the library who let me write this there and e-mail it to myself so I could post it here. You guys rock! And my school, who doesn't minds people laying on the snow and staring at the sky after hours. Without them, this story might not exist.
Authors notes: I wrote this all in one sitting! Wow. First time I ever did that. Hope you like. I got the idea while staring up at the sky on a snowy day, with complete silence all around. I just sort of built on it- this was a snow plot bunny. Remember, reviews are always welcome and flames are good too- wee need some warmth around here!
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It was cold.
Sandry trudged through the near-blizzard, not bothering to shield her bare face from the cruelties of the airborne ice. She could feel anything outside of her mind, whether it be the biting cold or a knife in her gut. She had not felt anything since she left Discipline. What had happened to the home she knew so well, so long ago? She knew not.
The pirates had come in the fall, when they were harvesting grain. They burned, they stole, they raped, they killed. Sandry could remember the way Lark had run out of her room, knitting clutched to her chest like a newborn as the pirate chased her down the stairs. The smoke looked like dust, clouding the air so she could no longer see her teacher, her friend. But she could hear the screams.
She had gotten out of the house alive. A blessing or a curse? The next morning, the smoke had cleared, and she saw the wreckage... the bodies left to dry in the unforgiving sun, the ashes of what had once been her dwelling place. Briar and Tris, dead together in the living room. Daja, found charred and smoldering on top of Little Bear, both killed and burned. Lark- raped and killed. Rosethorn- tied to a stake and burned. She knew Niko had lost an eye and both his arms, possibly a foot to the pirates cruel game. And yet Sandry had walked away.
And kept walking.
She was far north now, she knew not how far. The last human she had seen was that kind farmer who had offered her bread and a place to stay. A mother hen, looking after any chick who came along. But Sandry had just shook her head no, not even sparing a glance, not caring what the woman muttered under her breath about ungrateful wenches. She no longer ate, and sleep was not an option. She no longer needed either. And she knew that it would only keep her here to linger in the mortal world.
A small flock of sparrows burst up a few feet from Sandry. It was so quiet in this part of the woods that she could hear every wingbeat, as if time had slowed down. She did not stop to watch their journey across the sky, only kept walking. One foot in front of the other. The ground was white everywhere, and it was as if she walked in place. Nothing changed but the occasional tree root cutting across the forest floor.
The snow was coming down thick and fast now, even through the tops of the trees, and it was too hard to trudge against the wind. Sandry sat, not caring where the snow rubbed into her skin. Her cloak shielded her from most of it, but some got through to the backs of her legs. She felt a thought flit across her mind- how long would it take for her to be buried in the snow?
She wondered what the inside of her mind looked like. Was it black, velvet darkness, where new thoughts were bolts of color washing across its surface? Or would it mirror this landscape, cold and barren where a lone figure walked through sporadically? Maybe it was like the meditation rooms at the temple, calm and well-run with new thoughts strolling from one place to another. The temple where she learned to center herself.
She was fairly certain that the temple had been burned too.
A tree's branches swayed across her field of vision- she could see that she had sat down under it. A wide pine, patient and forgiving, but tough and resilient. Briar had taught her plants and trees a month from the time he died. Sandry hadn't shed tears for him. She hadn't shed tears for anyone. All that remained of the Sandry that existed before the attack was the shell that remained here in this world. The rest had been knocked out of her by the blow of hearing Lark die, cruelly tortured into nothingness.
The Sandry that remained was no longer human. She felt nothing. She saw only the ground in front of her feet, and heard only the wind. She was not even an animal, for there was no desire to survive, to make her life better. Not a plant, for she would never again take in the scent of Earth or the cool, sweet water of life. What was she? Just a shell and a ghost, a temporary arrangement.
She laid back and watched the blizzard frost the branches of her pine with ice and snow. snowflakes drifted onto her eyelashes, obscuring her vision. She closed her eyes and curled up into a fetal position, knowing that this temporary arrangement of spirit and skin could only last so long. She could feel the soul of Sandry- the real Sandry- slip into her body for an instant, begging her to get up, to fight- but it was gone again and the eyes of the once-noble woman flickered closed once more.
Letting go was easy. She didn't belong here. Sandry was but a guest here, one that had overstayed its welcome.
The wind knocked over her shell. The ghost of Sandry was far beyond the tops of the trees, rushing for a better future.
The snowstorm kept on storming, not caring for the bundle of shattered hopes it masked beneath icy waves.
It was cold.