Shadewood but everything changes, and everything dies

Setting this for tomorrow night since tonight wouldn’t make sense <3

Paranoia was a state Themis had lived in for years.

She recognized its iron clad grip on her galloping heart. In the strung out way she felt. The Shadewood would protect them, she had no doubts about that, Vorilye’s sister had no reason to check here when she found him in the plateau.

But it lingered. Behind her teeth, in her eyes, in the sharp curves of her body.

With the return of that mindset, came the nightmares. They came on slowly, at first. Flashes of a life hard lived, when she was still so young. The jeering faces, the names she never learned, the siblings dead because of the cuckoo in their nest. Then, they morphed. Changing and growing hot and molten in her brain. The scent of iron blood. The choked crying of a guardsmen moments before his throat was removed. The feeling of teeth, on her lower jaw and the back of her head, forcing her mouth to open.

The taste of the life of another.

Themis shot up out of her sleep, stumbling to her feet and taking several shaky steps out of the whelping den, breath coming in gasping wheezes as she sat down at its mouth, panting like a madwoman.

Γαμώ She managed when she got a little bit of shaky breath back, raising one paw to fold over her nose.