take charge of your life

~~Andraste~~

tagging @Mahler just for visibility & @Lyra to jump in(?) <3
takes place before this

Faerie had no realm in the forge;
and yet through conjurations within restless slumber she had wandered through the Fade; returned her to that midsommar altar. As she’d been informed, the starlit herself had given tell of the stygian beneath his spire a time before she had been struck down; and only when Hydra had been sated of the golem’s practiced greenseeing had the silver let herself blush. Blush then as she did now, balking into cavernwaters, as if the memory of their melding and not the skyscript was engraved upon her fair back for all to see. For hours, his breath had become hers; for hours, the scent of him had settled within her.

He remained in her blood — even lightning could not thieve that from her.

But Mahler’s seat was in Diaspora, and surely too were those shaded souls therein that lent upon his attendance. He should have not parted from his kith! Not for one such as she; not when leagues now lie between him and his claim even if he wished it not. She, who feared now that his answering a herald would only give her faint heart further cause to pardon him the moment his eyes sought hers; she hasn't quite met them yet. But what she had said to the queen was truth: the priest was practiced.

Profoundly.

No sooner had a shiver simpered at her thighs had the Stricken swore, vicious and tormented, the breath arrowing swift and sure from her lungs as she strode from the waters at once; a pale wince sculpting itself beneath shorn features as pins pricked at the rigid, newly-clefted roping bedding her spine. There were places there which either retained too much sensation or none at all, she’d told Lyra—

—who shrouded before her person, some quarry’s quartering in tow. Marred face filled with the same frozen flame which had dubbed her blasphemous, thin shoulders jutting in preparation to evade (as she had become so wont to do) ... until the voice presented itself as Hydra. Concern, almost unabashed.

After some moment’s hesitance, the reawakened continued her own retreat from the cavern’s currents, the flecks of crystals dulled by gloom prancing on water. “Ze pains have lessened, some,” an adamant fib! “but, I must beg forgiveness. I will replenish ze resources that you have brought for me.” ... Tried to use, anyways. She had only ever let Lyra minister the barest minimums. “I will not be without use.”