Even In The Grave, All Is Not Lost

The Lessons of My Childhood

A/N: as you can see I did a little Luna painting for Nadia's birthday (I post my art and edits to my Instagram: yumagnas.home)

. . .

There was a room in the tower. Small and bare. Filled with the smell of mildew and dust. Cold as the ice halls of Azgeda - or so she'd imagined. Being locked in it for hours or days at a time was standard as a form of punishment.

Luna's longest stint had been nine days.

A record, she'd been told, the longest penalty any novitiate had received since sheidheda. His longest had been ten days. Only seventeen hours had separated them, Titus had impressed. The underlying warning clear.

(nobody wanted to be like sheidheda)

For the life of her, Luna couldn't remember what particular rule she'd broken.

What she'd failed in.

But she could remember the cold. The feeling of walls pressing in on her, as she paced back and forth. Her only source of stimulation a handful of books she'd already read cover to cover during her previous confinements. Still, she churned through them. Hungrily. Desperately. Again and again. They kept her mind fed. And in that room, starvation of the mind was far more likely to destroy than that of the body.

But nothing could be done for the cold. The chill that came to suffocate her in the night, lying in bed with no-one beside her, surrounding her. Shadows creeping across floorboards, moving menacingly towards her place of refuge.

(she'd had trouble sleeping alone ever since)

That room had been bigger than this one.

Only, perhaps it hadn't been. Perhaps it was only her small size and the lack of furniture that had made it so cavernous.

She'd had a bed and a chamber pot.

Nothing else.

Nothing but the books. Imaginary worlds of infinite size that she could hide herself away in. There was freedom in those pages - however transient and illusory; an escape from herself. Who and what she was didn't exist in the places she read about. She didn't exist.

(and it was better that way)

There were no books in this room. But Luna had something far better.

Raven.

And she'd been waiting for her to leave. Dreading the approaching moment but knowing it was inevitable. Raven wasn't as sick as her and apart from the rash she appeared almost completely recovered.

Luna waited.

But she never left.

Not for good at least. Raven had departed the room to take a shower several minutes ago. A shower she was desperately in need of - and one Luna was hungering for herself at this point, though she didn't feel entirely up to the challenge yet. For now, she would still have to make do with sponge baths. Not a particularly pleasant substitute, given Luna's body tensed every time her skin came into contact with the wet cloth.

(her face she left entirely alone. It could survive a few days of grime and sweat)

Unpleasant or not, it was still better than the alternative. She felt reasonably confident that she would be able to stand for the full length of a shower without issue. She'd had no trouble doing so inside this room. But after her nightmares the other night had stirred things up, she was nowhere near as confident that the spray of water on her skin, drenching her from head to toe, wouldn't trigger a panic attack.

And that might make her slip. Fall. Especially with her muscles as weak as they were. Her reflexes so poor.

At least if she started to panic in here, seated on her bed, she wouldn't have to worry about cracking her head open. Something that would only increase the length of this suffocating confinement.