So, as much as I adore you lot, I'm not going to keep asking forgiveness when there's a lapse in updates, not because I don't want you to forgive me, but because even I have to wonder when do they stop sounding like apologies and start sounding like excuses? Please just know the story is not stopping or going on hold or anything, I've just recently had a lot of unforeseen circumstances of varying source and degree pop up that have impeded my ability to get these chapters written (let alone posted) in the time they're supposed to be. BUT I will thank you again for your patience and gracious understanding.
FIFTY-SEVEN
She wrenched herself from slumber only a couple of short, precious hours later. It couldn't possibly be as late as she'd been sleeping the last few days … probably the sun'd just come up, but she hardly relished the idea of opening the shutters to check.
Nothing jarred one fully, if painfully, awake like a shot of daylight right in their sleep-bleary eyes.
Sitting up, Hermione gave herself a slow, sobering shake before bracing her elbows on her knees and resting her forehead against her palms. Her eyes drifted closed again.
Another nightmare, was it? It was all … blurry, as though suddenly everything in her dream had been moving too fast for her to comprehend what had been happening, but …
She didn't feel like that was how it had gone at all.
The witch could swear the beat of her heart slowed in her chest and her breath stilled in her lungs as she tried to recall ….
Colorless flesh …. That sounded disturbingly correct.
Eyes … were there eyes? Black eyes or darkness pooling within empty sockets? She couldn't be sure, the image wouldn't stop its frantic jittering long enough for her to tell.
The mouth, all those jagged rows of little teeth, but it wasn't the teeth that disturbed her, nor even the sense of bleak, indescribable figures gathering around it, drawing closer and then slinking backward every time she tried to get a look. Though she knew both of those things should be quite upsetting.
Repressing the urge to clap her hands over her ears at the memory, she couldn't help recalling the way the horrible thing at the center of all that half-formed, undulating darkness had opened its mouth.
The way it had unleashed that human-yet-not scream that made her skin crawl and her stomach tie itself in icy knots.
