𝐼𝑁𝑁𝑂𝐶𝐸𝑁𝐶𝐸 𝐿𝑂𝑆𝑇 // 𝐴. 𝐷𝐸 𝑅𝑈𝑁𝐸

𝑋

| X. Que Dieu Veille Sur Ton Âme Fatiguée |

—

Marion let out a quiet huff of frustration when the Priest they found in the courtyard had fled, after telling them to leave. Apparently it was dangerous– it only made Marion want to wring out his neck even more. Nowhere was safe for them, not anymore.

It was not like she could do anything to the Priest, her hands were marred and stung like hell. Her newfound defenselessness scared her to her core, she felt like a wolf with no teeth. Wolves with no teeth can still growl– she wouldn't let anyone think she was weak.

That was the last thing she needed to be.

"Is he the one who knows where Laurentius is?" Hugo asked, his eyebrow's furrowing in a way that reminded Marion of how similar he and Amicia looked.

"It has to be him... it has to." Amicia responded, as she determinedly trudged along after the man.

They found themselves in a room filled with multiple broken beds. The place was completely ransacked. Marion felt her gut churn–although the pain in her twitching fingers had already caused it to grow uneasy–, had the inquisition passed through here? No, they wouldn't ruin their own place of worship.

Well, Marion wouldn't exactly put it past them. The soldiers of the inquisition were the least saintly people she'd ever met. She wondered if Nicholas had prayed for forgiveness after slaughtering her father.

Marion suddenly became hyper aware of the ivory beads of the rosary wrapped around her neck, the one she used to help count her prayers on the rare occasion she did pray– on the day's when she felt a desperate need for any kind of reassurance. It was her mothers, the one thing her father did tell her about the woman was that she refused to take it off.

A part of her wanted to rip it off her neck, let the expensive white beads break from the silver chains and scatter across the floor. She didn't want to pray to God if all her prayers would continue to go unheard. She let out a quiet huff, now was not the time to meddle over such matters.

"Oh, they've broken everything..." Hugo spoke, as he looked over the ruined room.

"What's going on here?" Amicia stopped in the middle of the room, and took a moment to look over her surroundings.

Marion's eyes slimmed as she looked around the room, shelves were barely hanging onto the walls, bed frames looked as if a giant hand had snapped them in two, and linens were ripped to shreds.

"Perhaps they're making room for bigger beds?" Hugo responded, as he too looked around.

Marion's eyes trailed to a small, unlocked chest in the corner of the room. She tilted her head, curious as to what was in the small chest. She strayed from Amicia and Hugo, so she could kneel down in front of the chest and reach her hand out to open it.

The dark-haired girl huffed in frustration when she could barely get her fingers to close around the latch so she could lift it up– not necessarily due to the immense pain, but to the fact that her fingers seemed to stop listening to her.

She couldn't feel certain parts of her palms, areas where the burns were the worst, and the cuts ran the deepest. The last two fingers on her left hand had also been affected, whilst her other fingers painfully twitched and writhed like beings that were separate from her own, those two fingers laid still. She couldn't feel them, almost like they were never there in the first place.