Chapter Text
Her mouth hurt, and she tasted hot copper in her throat.
Staring up into the white sky, Avarie Tabris didn’t move. Couldn’t move. For sixteen years, she had been living, surviving in this place… and on that pure white morning, she decided that had been enough. She was ready for the earth to swallow her up… to just crack open beneath her, and inhale her. Body, memory and soul.
The deep, laughing voices had long ago melted into echoes and then into nothing. Gone. Headed west, with their pockets full of sticky gold and silver coins.
Coins that had once been warmed in her mother’s pocket.
They’d left her here, lying on the side of a dusty forgotten road. It was silence. Stretching everywhere. The world had gone quiet. And she floated here, where ever this was, between existence and not. She floated inside a held breath.
But even that couldn’t last.
“Stay away from her, Half Breed!”
Voices were scaling back her way, and as she sank back against the hard packed soil, she could feel footsteps, heavy and fast. Coming towards her. Back to her.
Strong hands grabbed her under the arms, pulling her upward.
“Get up, Ava! Get up!” the male voice cracked.
She slumped against the body holding her. The metallic taste on her tongue was overwhelming, and she turned her head to spit out a mouthful of blood.
The world was full of horrible sound. And the sky was not clean and white, but dawn stained sickly yellow. And then, with a deep ache behind her eyes, she remembered. She had lay there all night. They had left her here, after hitting her, after putting a blade in her mouth, after hurting her…
“Please, Ava. Fight back!”
“N-Nox?”
The human holding her exhaled a strange sound against her ear, “Please don’t give up yet.”
She had lurched away from him, standing on her own two unsteady legs. She looked at him, and saw panic in familiar blue-green eyes. Her best friend's eyes.
His face was bruised. His eye swollen, a deep fresh cut running through his eyebrow, nearly to his eye. The human bastard of a dead elf woman and a human warrior long gone, Nox had been by her side through all of this. Every day. Every fight. They’d both been targeted by the noble’s son… two alienage rats that gave good chase.
But that day, in Lennox Carver’s bloody face, she saw something totally new. A mature hate, a hardness. She filled her lungs with electric air.
“We have to get you out of here. Vaughn’s coming back. Please…” he extended his hand to her.
She took it.