RP:Broken Glass

Part of the Time Heals All Wounds Arc

Synopsis: Penelope is finally alone after the night with Linken, and she is experiencing post-traumatic stress.

Silent Forest

Old Halifax Cottage

The clock was ticking, and with each passing tick the dark was flooding into the old creaky bedroom where she once lived time ago. Before the metallic-armed elf and made this a place of haunted memories. The room smelled of dusty must. The sheets were the same but worn from the wilted cottage that was left abandoned. Old books of herbs and cooking craft rested on the shelves. Knitting books. Basic crafts, but those books seemed mediocre, and the room felt hollow. Not her own. The room was basically a shell. A bed, a shelf with left over old books, and a few old empty surfaces. Everything else was left at the studio in the midst of town, and it would take a lot of paint and time to fix what was lost in the cottage. Hope.

As the dark crept in, Penelope stares up at the ceiling in the rickety bed. Hands are outstretched as she stares into blank spaces in the room. The mind turns with each tick until there is never-ending swirl. Clouded thoughts that cannot be pieced together. From the visions of ever-flowing crimson pools, to the flashes of bright white lights, to stainless steel piercing flesh, to words of ‘I love you’ that had a tang of bitterness that was caught on the roof of her mouth. It took a couple of hours to scrub the blood out of tangled hair, and her skin still felt heavy. Stained. Raw. Not her own.

Moments pass as Penelope stares at the ceiling before the room becomes a little too tight in the thick atmosphere. Like someone, or something, is watching her from the corner of the room where an end table rests. The moon pushes through the glass and the reflection makes the shadows of the table rise into a taller shadow making the Ardelian twitch. Her body, instantly, moves across the other side of the room to fumble for the matches. She strikes the stick, and the flame creates a faint glow. The flame waves over several candles resting on a vanity. The orange hue glows brighter until her face is shown in the mirror. In the reflection, she can see that the growing shadow is only an end table. The shaking anxiety releases in exhale and moss eyes flick to the mirror.

The bruises that rest around her neck make her tilt her chin up and, with each inch she lifts, the tighter it felt to breathe further. A vision takes her back to the face of the entity with pits for eyes and the smell of decaying breath, and the elf’s shattered face. The two faces that disfigured her current world. Reality. And in the moment, there was no air flowing through her lungs. The druid’s chest tightens and hands reach up to tug the strings loose on the nightgown she wore. Once the strings are pulled, oxygen is able to come through and she sputters as if coming out of a dream and throws hands against the vanity. Her fingers run through her hair until tips rub against her scalp. A finger runs against… dry blood.

Penelope lowers her fingers down for observation of the peeling dry blood still somewhat left in her hair before she feels the thick layer swarm her. Eyes lock on the mirror before her, and there is the girl with the tangled hair and blood-stained face. Eyes of fear, and a pit of emptiness. There is a small shrill before she begins to rub her face repeatedly. “No, no, no,” the crimson stain barely wears. In an impulsive, aggressive flash her hands reach out for the rundown mirror before the glass is ripped off the wall and thrown to the ground. The candles that were briefly lit, go out and the cottage is left with nothing but shrill cries and broken glass.