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001. BURY ME FACE DOWN
(cw: sexual abuse.)
Vira has given a lot of thought to her death. More than it deserves, really — if she's not careful, her life might be wasted away planning it's own morbid end. But then again, all life is like that; fragile, wasteful. Vira can't remember the last time she pulled herself out of the bed with intent to do something other than survive. And that's okay — life is just preparation for the beyond, and Vira intends to find something great when she slips beyond the veil.
But in all the beautifully crafted funeral plans and epic thoughts of a dramatic demise, Vira still hasn't settled on the perfect way to die. She's constantly surrounded by it, the piles of corpses and heaps of bodies basically Ketterdam's version of mountainside scenery — maybe that's desensitised her to how cruel the skeletal hands of death really are, maybe she's just a coward hiding behind a mask of courage. She only managed to decide one fact: her death will be epic. The whole world watching, those who love her screaming in agony. Poetically falling off a cliff, metaphorical in some way that she doesn't quite understand. Crumbling to ash in a flaming inferno, sacrificing herself to save someone she loves in an out of character act of selfless heroism.
And Vira is certainly not going to die like this. She can feel her spirit withering, fading away — submitting to whatever terrible darkness lies Beyond. Her skin is paling fast, losing a little of it's softness. She always liked her skin before — relatively unblemished, except for the usual scars. Now it feels cold to the touch, emanating a frostlike air as if she is a Fjerdan, a hellish witch hunter. Her stomach is shrinking, constricting as though a serpent is coiled around, restraining it— she's wanted for less food recently, but she needs more because now her head is spinning and the ground is growing bigger and her legs are shaking, the sky blurring into one huge smudge of smoke and cloud. You should've eaten something this morning. Or yesterday, or the day before. But when she tried to eat, the bread turned to ash in her mouth, sticking to the sides of her throat, scraping and scratching and poisoning her from the inside out.
She forces herself to take another step forward, refusing to fall onto the hard cobbled stone. It feels as though she's been walking for hours, each step like pushing through hardening amber, forcing herself through walls upon walls of heavy snow.
This is no way to be walking through Ketterdam, she thinks. Anyone could slip out of those spineless shadows and stick a knife in her spine, any thief with any good sense would take one look at her and say: "there's a weak girl." And then they'll creep up beside her, slip one hand into her bag and steal her money. She's barely holding herself together. Maybe she should've grabbed a needle and thread, and used it to tightly bind her limbs together, maybe then they wouldn't be so frail and shaky. She's genuinely worried she might begin to fall apart.
