Crawling realisation of something in the dark.
Something seeping closer, twisting deeper.
Pain!
Ignoreignoreignoreignore.... Please... please?
Fighting to stay in the black lack - awareness of need, of desperation - never leave here! Here is safety, here is cool encompassing nothing.
Sharp tearing, vicious red ripping - screams, voice hoarse with use. Whose voice? Whose pain?
Sudden, blinding light, bursting over everything, freezing the scene outside like a strobe - a face grinning madly over her, dripping with sweat and lust, teeth bloody and eyes squeezed shut as he shouts in triumph. Her dull whimper, falling from lips wet with someone else's saliva as she awakens - and in that instant, understands.
Driving through his fragile sanity, an ice pick through his brain, she tears and violates as he has done to her. Ripping through all shreds of thought, bulldozing over memory and personality, she feels him die, he still inside her, she still within him.
Running, as far and as long as possible, she retreats to the comforting nothingness.
She opened her eyes again, swimming through layers of foreign memories, blinking at the world she sees around her now. Empty faces trudge blindly from place to place, afterimages flickering through her mind as she anticipates their steps, path of least resistance blanking her from their minds. She flickers tendrils of magic, of self in terrified expectation through minds dulled by the monotony of life, rummaging through secrets, feeling the pain in her lip where she tears, the blood pouring rich into her mouth. The pain shows her the way. Shows their secrets. She fades out again, deeper, safer, warm and alone.
Voices wake her again, as someone else speaks with her mouth, cocky, self-assured, competent. She stands back, watching as if through a stranger's eyes as the person using her voice gets rid of the busybody, filtering her senses through the invader's screen of thoughts to find out what it was, who it had been. She catches flickers of authority, hints of boredom and touches of a hunger for power, but the bright burning of lust that her voice, her body is encouraging is too terrifyingly similar to what she saw that night. She retreats again.
This time, she responds to the demands of her own voice, petulant this time and angry. She stares at the note book in front of her, blinking down at writing not her own, but from her own hand, still clutching the chewed pen. She reads - and reads, and reads, as the past months of her life come back in dream-blurred images from someone else's memories. A sharp tugging inside her demands attention, and she numbly hushes the half formed awareness, concentrating on what she has in her hands. Jumbled words, sentences begun in one hand and completed in another, sense twisted beyond all meaning. Voices, angry and hurting, blame her for this pain, this confusion. She whimpers, the only sound she's made since this happened.
A shattering, agonising ripping, and the warm gush of blood that floods her feet are the next Awakening. The faces that greet her are three this time, screaming with the death of the thing that had been growing inside her. Three bodies, three faces, one voice - one that might once have been hers before she abandoned reality. The woman tears at her face, blood dripping from the scratches she's inflicted already. Her contribution to the threnody is a changing, multi-faceted wail; birth denied, beginnings cut off before they could begin and time torn from its roots. The lady stands, head bowed - her elegy is slow, steady and sombre. Stability does not deny despair, and in her incantations, she builds an image of the warmth and security of could have beens. The child, curled up and crying in hysteria, giggles with no hint of humour, high pitched screams of shattered mirth demanding recognition of her hollow victory. She fades out of consciousness, allowing the silence to enclose her again.
This time, the visions she has are more insistent - she walks with the future and the past as if they were the now, and cannot help but dig through the minds of those around her for selves less torn than hers. Then, a face shines in the dark, an image she must find. That one can make the voices stop, can make the three faces silence themselves. They deny, beg, demand - anything but to watch her walk that road of all the possibilities.
Only change is constant, she whispers as a mantra to the voices that fight to keep her walking, to keep her mind working. Constancy is only death. Death is just a change...
She walks up to the face she's dreamed of so often, and speaks for the first time with her own voice.
"Make them go away. Make them stop."
He laughs, and pulls her close, recognising her for what she is, and the trinity in her mind scream as she destroys them, as she dies under his fangs.
Who says death doesn't have a sense of humour? She rarely wakes, these days, hiding far beneath the others, hiding from the world with the knowledge of what she sacrificed. But even there, she's not escaped - now, her dreams are tainted not with sweat and pain and broken terror, but with fire and blood. With the sickening knowledge that soon, all this will come to an end.
She never meant for the moon-touched to make her part of them, one of them, but the sickest joke is that the three who feared their ending have found a way to live on - as the ones she forces to cope with the world.
Sadie Newman is long lost now. Her avatar of the Morrigan has a new face - Macha, Badb, Nemain...
In the silence of the weeks that followed, the three that appeared in the place of the wanderer who had begged the dead madman for death were confused, uncertain of what was going on - but between themselves, they proved useful. One smiled as she twisted brains to madness, until the victim begged to confess his sins. Another wielded knives in bloody patterns, carving a path through to the wounded, determined to never let go. The third smiled politely and passed untouched through the layers of kine to find their target. They hammered out an accord, and each wrote of what they remembered, allowing them all to make sense of the dream-memories that is all they share. Their begetter occasionally rises to the surface with her demon-haunted dreams, whispering truths and lies, believing her visions of the future.
The one time they disbelieved her, they walked into the jaws of wolves.
They mourned over their lost pack, and walked on alone - the city beckoning in the distance. Too long wanderers, they saw a place to stay, and she whispered of hope for the first time. So they found New Bremen, and a new family.
She still speaks from the dark, but they're growing stronger now, understanding far better what the three of them can be. The woman, the lady, the girl child - all of them know pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that they live through, but all of them fear her awakening again. Once they would have pleaded with gods and demons to save her fragile sanity - now they beg before they sleep that she does not come to them in the day. Roles have been reversed, and the avatar now faces the night skies, waiting for the whispers of what used to be a human being.