INCIPIENT ➵ EDMUND PEVENSIE

43 | Salvaged for a Greater Purpose

43 | SALVAGED FOR A GREATER PURPOSE

Elliott blinks, her eyes painstakingly adjusting to the furious glow of the sun as it looks down on her, beaming through the specks of canopy that hang from above.
 
    Her lips curl into an enervated smile as she lets out a breath of a laugh. She's very nearly forgotten how the sun feels against her skin.

    Elliott then shifts her limbs, gently, still expectant to find herself restrained in algid metal, more than aware that brute force against those iron cuffs will get her nothing but wrists that are more bruised and battered than they already are.

    Well, while she does let out a pained cry as a bolt of agony laces the nerves that stretch from the fingers of her right hand to her shoulder, this time, unlike on many occasions previously, Elliott takes gratitude in the granted liberty to hold her arm close to her chest.

    It is some form of comfort, at the least. But is she afraid or relieved? Elliott isn't sure herself.

    I must be dead, she thinks.

    It just doesn't make sense to wake in a thicket, overwhelmed by its suffocating tranquillity, when she had been padlocked in captivity seconds - no, it can very well have even been hours or days - ago, does it?

    Unless-

    Odd, she recalls a flash of vivid gold, but with her head and her memories in a muddled blur, she can't quite put a finger on the events fore her last blackout, or even tell fact from fiction.

    Elliott stays caught in quite a daze, only truly gathering the will to hoist herself from the ground after a period has passed. Even so, the physical torture that comes with each inch of movement keeps her tangled in the grass for the longest time. 

    It isn't till a terrible discovery hits her does she lurch from her stance in horror, giving little regard to what magnificent pain the motion inflicted upon her already wrecked frame.

    The cutlasses that lay beneath her - dead.

    And it doesn't take long for it to dawn on her that the very source of death is her-

    "Blood?" her voice escapes with the likes of a scratch through her parched throat. Her fingers sink into the soil, and they emerge with a brighter, wetter red than the maroon specks that caked her nails from before.

    "Down to what swims in your veins," the soldier's words burn into the back of her head.

    Oh, so that's what he meant.

    It makes sense to Elliott now - the routine dumping of her into a tub wasn't some kind of novel torture. Well, it wasn't solely. More significantly, it must have been a means to draw the cursed vital fluid out of her system, from the slashes they so intricately carved into her skin.