Sometimes a wound can be a sound, each note like shards of glass against her throat, contorting her mouth into unnatural shapes. She struggled with it, as if to speak would spill venom from her lips, such vitriol she held towards the man. Zenos, she says unwittingly, only when necessary, when conversation would allow no other course, the sound coming out hoarse, as if in the aftermath of a scream.

There is little she wouldn’t do to forget he ever existed.

But as fate would have it, she would not be allowed the mercy.

There were screams, chaos, the sound of snapping bones and the grate of steel against mail. Familiar, but no less distressing, duty and resolve settling her nerves like a well-worn coat. She sees Lucia launching herself onto the field, her body like an arrow let loose, plumes of smoke and snow adding to the confusion, until suddenly— Fandaniel, black tendrils, darkness more tactile than any she had known before, until her vision fades to black. The last thing she feels is the atmosphere pressing against her, until she is something smaller than before.

——————

She opens her eyes as if entering a nightmare.

The preceding tempest now silenced, it was as if she had entered the eye of the storm.

Before her is Zenos, his mannerisms a poor imitation of a man eating. It couldn’t fool anyone, none would believe him capable of consuming anything with the restraint of utensils. Fandaniel stood next to her, and though she imagines her arm rising to grasp her cane, she feels as though there is nothing for her to move. She is both weightless and weighted, a thin, wispy version of herself encased in some sort of heavy, immobile cage. The meat before her seems to pulsate within the darkness, and despite the luscious appearance of the table, she can only smell the stench of a battlefield, blood and viscera and soil filling her nose until she could imagine a feeling like nausea creeping through her stomach.

Eithne cannot help the silent terror creeping throughout her heart— throughout the very aether of her soul.

“Take a moment, too, to familiarize yourself with that borrowed flesh.”

She can see trembling hands coming into view as she struggles to lift them, as she feels her aether beginning to flow through deadened, unfamiliar corridors, heavy and slow and alien. Once the realization settles, she can feel a heart quicken, the rush of blood drowning out Fandaniel’s incessant chittering, the rush of aether allowing her for greater control over this foreign entity. The words spill from foreign lips like an alien tongue, ragged and guttural and pleading—

“Give me back my body...!”

She cannot feel her blessing, cannot feel Hydaelyn’s light coursing through her veins, cannot feel the weight of Ardbert and Fray and Myste— Within her there is a silence unlike any she had ever known, and for a moment she thinks she must have perished at Camp Broken Glass. A cruel trick of the mind, her final moments consumed by some purgatory of her own making, Zenos’ ghost haunting her to the last.

And throughout it all, he dines.

Robotic, repetitive, unnatural. The clink of metal against porcelain, tender flesh rendered and consumed without a thought. He ate with dull, listless eyes, and Eithne wondered if even the pleasure of eating had been lost to him, too, if he had ever had it at all. There seemed to be little difference between the cow and the hare, when served upon his platter. There is a noise that sounds like growling, though it seemed to reverberate through the very marrow of her bones. Fandaniel calls it Daddy, and the realization spreads through this borrowed body like wildfire. There could be no other, so deep within Garlean lands. That she had failed to sense a primal a few yalms away brings with it a new feeling— despair.

Fandaniel proceeds to explain his designs, the summoning and extending of Anima’s power, each word a thorn wrapping itself around this tattered heart, her helplessness filling their lungs like water, each breath more difficult than the last, until Zenos’ voice cuts through the noise with his usual drivel.

“Does the pursuit of prey you have bested before excite you?”

Had she the strength to stand, she would have bludgeoned him.

There was, quite possibly, nothing she cared for less than his obsession, the “hunt” of which she had been made an unwilling participant. Butchery, as he described it, the thrum of his voice extending the vowels, was not how she perceived it. Could she slaughter him without a care, without dooming this star, she would have done so— No, all this warrior could do was make certain he would trouble no one but her. She would play the part of prey, all white silk furs and lithe feet, the long months of battle for Ala Mhigo having taught her the most efficient way to avoid becoming the slab of flesh upon his plate. There was no one else who could avoid his blade, and even someone as mighty as the Warrior of Light was still unable to save Garlemald from getting caught in the crossfire.

She struggled to keep her mind steady, honed and focused on his voice, hanging onto each raspy consonant and enunciated vowel in the hopes of finding a clue to escape. She mustn’t think of the Scions and her allies, lest she lose what little composure remained within her, and yet Zenos seemed to approach a twisted, dreary form of delight in pulling from her these memories. Arenvald, Nidhana... She tries to stop her fears from feeding into themselves— She mustn't think of Alisaie and Alphinaud’s fearful eyes at her disappearance, the tremble in G’raha Tia’s lips...

“I have only just begun.”

Her eyes follow as he walks away from the table; slow, languid steps taking him to a darkened area of the room. Once again she felt the limits of this body, as she strained her eyes against the darkness— Until she saw it.

The innocent hare within the wolf’s maws, all silken white hair and leadened legs sitting atop a sinewy throne.

There she was.

The body moves forward, stumbling out of the chair and towards what should be her’s by birthright, the one thing granted to her and only her when she first took breath upon this star.

She runs, and Zenos smiles.

The wolf’s maw snaps shut.

There is nothing that could describe the sensation of existing outside of one’s body, to see it contort by a force not your own. There is even less precedent for the feeling borne out of Fandaniel’s announcement. Eithne tries to stop the bile rising, the feeling of disconnect between a parched, spasming throat and her terror-addled aether tinges her sight red, small dots of darkness flickering in the corners. There is an itch that begins to spread beneath the skin, once she sees herself rise, the wrongness of her own face, twisted, staring back at her.

The wolf swallows, and the hare is gone.

In her mind she sees herself flayed, each tendon exposed.There she can examine every inch of flesh and pick out the pieces of his wretched self that wormed its way in; could rearrange her face, her posture, her limbs, to what she had been like before. Get out...!, her heart cries, but there is no familiar symphony to soothe her, no breathy chuckles, no golden eyes that pierce through the shadows. The body convulses. She could scream, could she find where the lungs and the windpipe connected, but before that happens there is an Oh dear! behind her to pull her scattered mind away, and Fandaniel’s vile voice slithers its way in through the wounds Zenos had opened—

Her friends.

The storm moves towards Camp Broken Glass, and the tempest finds her again.