ssSSSSSsssssss

The quiet gasp might be mistaken for the building pressure of steam, desperate in its search for a way out.

Lonicera knows better. She knows they will morph and they will twist, and so they do.

What have you done?

She does not reply, picking her way across the rubble that has suddenly begun to litter the cavern floor. Lonicera has been here before, whether in her dreams or in a dive long past she cannot recall. It does not matter. The twisting roots of the great oak tree had wound themselves around her heart, and she is as much a part of the dungeon as the voice of her mother, trapped within its stone walls.

You will never be rid of me, my blood is in your vienssssSSSSSS.

A sharp prick, as she steps too close to a remnant of something once great, now destroyed and it lashes out against her.

Loni does not stop, her head held high in defiance of the echoes of a mare long dead.

The hiss grows louder, the stone at her feet seems to expand with it, as if the very cobble she treads might burst.

You cannot ignore me

She smiles then, a sharp defiant thing, the one she has learned through her years as a courser. The one she has shared only with Charen.

“What an odd sound,” she comments sweetly, goaded only this far to acknowledge the whispers that flutter like moths across her mind. Her mother screams, a sound that had frightened her down to her marrow once, but now is nothing more than a whisper of the dead.