The great door crashes into its frame, slammed by the hand of the silence that swells into the room. Only as the last echo ebbs away does she remember she is wounded, reeled back to reality by the flat, pittering sound of her own blood dripping upon the floor.
She raises her hands and stares at them, shining crimson streaming from multiple slashes across their surfaces, a pattern to drive any fortune-teller to madness. The idle thought breaks through her numb rage for an instant: imagine the reaction of one of those itinerant peddlers of cheap magic, asked to read the map of horror etched on her palm.
A long lifeline. She almost laughs, but it's a bitter thing that fills her mouth with iron and salt, or perhaps she's just bitten her tongue too hard again.
Her gaze wanders over the metal shards littering the floor, reflecting bits of the room like a shattered mirror. She sees her own face, a fleck of skeletal white against a field of scarlet drapery, and turns away from it, leaving the empty room to its silence.
She wraps her hands in her own skirts to keep from leaving a trail down the hall. The sliced flesh throbs and stings, welcome reminders that she still can feel something. It is a long time before she speaks a word…a charm with which she once could have healed such superficial wounds from the inside-out. Now, depleted, it merely closes what was open.
But better that, than bleed where anyone can see.