[arcane]

arcane | rewrite [1]

——
"G r a v e m e n, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. "

- Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
——

Kara felt a sheen of sweat dance across her heated skin from underneath her cotton blanket despite the cold weather that existed beyond her apartment walls. Under the distorted ray of moonlight that escaped her dusty shutters, she began to sway from side to side as she tried to escape the clutches of her recurring nightmare. Her long blond hair laid in clumps across her pillow, which was lazily constructed of a wooden board with a spare blanket wrapped around it. The fluttering of her eyes was futile, as her conscious failed to escape its self-binding.

She would have been speechless if presented with the question of what the contents of the nightmare actually were. The dreams were consistently abstract: they were compromised of small pieces of color that were a part of a messy collage of blurry images that interacted in ways of which her brain couldn't make sense of.

But there was always one thing that always so clear despite the fuzziness.

Karrah darling, it's time to wake up.

It was as if she had been snapped out of a spell. Her head jerked up from her pillow and her limbs robotically straightened and threw her upright. After taking a moment to adjust to the abrupt change of position, Kara lifted a trembling hand to her face and held her own cheek, where she felt a lingering touch from the feminine voice that rescued her from herself.

She let her fingers slide down her cheek in reminiscence before a cool breeze brushed against her damp body, allowing her to regain her senses. Kara's arms instinctively wrapped around herself as she braced for the next draft of air which drifted inside from the small gap in the lone window of her apartment. Upon approaching it, she moved the shutters out of the way so that she could firmly close it, but not before another breeze reached out to caress her long fringes.

The brief elevation allowed her to assume a clear portrait of the moon. She couldn't help but admire its condescending view of her figure from up in the sky; it knowing that any exerted viciousness could not be reciprocated from down here in her apartment.

With a sigh that seemed to resonate throughout the room, her thin fingers finally grasped onto the ledge of the window and was able to slide it down, only for it to be caught on a thin envelope that rested on the edge of the windowsill. Any confusion she might have harbored initially had all but disappeared at the familiar crest that caught the rays of moonlight in a sinister way unique only to itself.

——

The first thing she felt as she stepped outside that night was wind beating against her back, pushing her hair behind her, the blonde strands of hair falling haphazardly against her figure. The wind gave it life, twisting and pushing the obscenely long follicles at its whim, deciding to dry the beads of sweat that stubbornly resided on the skin of her neck like a designated mop.

It wasn't as if she hadn't heard endless remarks from others about getting a haircut, but if she was going to be honest, it was on nights such as these that she was happy that she refused the offers because of how the sheer volume of her hair played the part of a much needed blanket.

It took only a moment in the cold to remember how she only had just grabbed onto the very first sweater that she had found laying on the hook near the front door before she had slid it open and close in one graceful movement.

It was just her luck that this was the thinnest sweater she owned.

She hesitated for a moment, eyes taking into account the barrier between the frosty embrace of the outdoors and the tantalizing warmth that would envelop her should she choose to step inside, before her footsteps betrayed her and trailed the ground ahead.