SEVEN DEVILS, fili durin

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"We send the lightest first."

Trying to call out to her magic in the secrecy of her own mind only to hear nothing reply to her was a haunting experience that would scar her for the rest of her days, it was something that she hadn't expected to feel like this, like her whole body was being crushed with her own strife and grief. And every step that Nymeria took made her tremble, from the tips of her toes to the hair on her head, an aching blister that boiled her blood and cracked her bones until she felt like she was breathing in nothing but ash and disease from the very forest that was maiming her from the inside out.

It had been a few days since she'd taken a step onto the Elven soil, days before she'd made the whole of middle-earth shake with the devastation of her red chaos as it parted from her without so much as a farewell. Well, that wasn't quite true, it hadn't left her, not completely, not at all, she could still feel it's heat coiling in her stomach like a band pulled taunt and ready to snap only never getting to that state of completion, like she was falling and falling and falling from the sky with no end in sight, just a continuous plunge into the abyss where darkness would finally claim her.

And the faè didn't know which was more infuriating, the fact she knew her chaos was there, unreachable and unresponsive, buried with ruins that made her ache so completely she kept forgetting her own bastard name, shoulders sagging with the weight of the darkness of the forest as it rested upon her, pushing her further and further into the fiery pits that awaited her below...or the fact that the dwarves just kept staring at her like she was about to expire any moment now, with her hobbit curled at her side, pretending to be scared for her own sake while she leaned against him just slightly and the company's eyes watching her every move.

It was frustrating, it was pathetic, it was extremely annoying...and worst of all she was pretty sure it was needed because she had never felt weaker in her life, not just because her chaos was no longer clinging to her skin in a deadly embrace full of promise, but because it seemed that everything inside her was withering up like a flying flower, rotting and decaying inside her until its petals turned black and threatned to choke her on its crumbling dust which would honestly be a better fate than living with this grief...she didn't know how other creatures lived like this, painfully aware of their every breath, it was pushing her to the edge on insanity.

But...it seemed like she wasn't the only one in that regard, because the longer they spent in the forest, the more on edge the dwarves seemed to be, she could see it, the way their hands hovered over their weapons, the way Fili and Kili and even Bofur seemed to cling to her back like they were protecting her from the looming eyes of the trees, could hear it in the way they were quicker to snap at each other with tongues dipped in venom and cruelty.

Everything about the forest just felt wrong, almost hateful as it thickened the air and made them all choke of their own violation, filling their lungs with rot and something vile until the tension was pulled taunt and bloodied. They'd barely even been in the haunting graveyard of trees for long, and already Nymeria could feel the cold crusps of insanity claw at her as she walked across the soil, barely lifting her gaze up and just focusing on keeping one foot in front of the other as she leaned further and further against Bilbo who shouldered her weight the best he could without complaint.

Her sleep was laced with nightmares, even more so that usual when she'd wake with a gasp on her lips and a sob in her throat, seeing his face in the rough bark of the trees, in the reflection of the water, in the dwarves face when she'd eventually lift her head to see where they were going. She could even hear his voice in the wind, howling as it curled over her ears like a loving whisper hiding secret intentions of greed, burning her skin with his empty promises that only brought her grief.