On Mount Alyppia

Broken Wing

This was not her nest.
Arista didn't wake up. She drifted lazily into awareness, her mind slowly beginning to whirr. There was something itchy on her face, and a throbbing in her head, as if she had tipped back too much drink. She was weak, she realized. Not simply tired, as most mornings, but wholly, utterly drained of life and energy, a dead mind in a still-sore husk of a body. She tried to move. Her stiff limbs refused.
She was not anywhere she knew, she thought. Whatever she was lying on smelled sweet, and was soft, so much softer than the stiff, dirty tangle of discarded blankets she kept on her rooftop nest. There was neither sun not wind nor rain upon her face, leither dust nor day-old sweat coating her skin. Where was she?
Arista tried to open her eyes, but only the left one seemed to work. Sleep gummed as her vision was, she could make out little more than warm hues of brown and gold, and vague, fuzzy shapes she did not recognize. She tried to move again, but her body was warm and comfortable and mending, and did not want to listen to her.
Arista's mind was slowly clearing, and as she remembered the last night her she began to panic, her heart pounding. The memory slammed into her in a series of stark, brutal images she did not want to look at. She squeezed shut the one eye that was left, not even wanting to think about what the other looked like. Where was she what had happened was she dying was she dead what...
A warm hand rested on her forehead, and immediately she relaxed, her aches and pains fading away. Arista swallowed and forced open her eye once more. Framed by a ray of sun shining in from the window behind him was a pale-haired, golden-skinned man. Arista squinted, trying to make out his features, but the sun's glare was much too bright. Her eye slipped shut once more.
"Where... where..." she croaked.
"Calm yourself," the man said. "You are somewhere safe."
"Alyppia?"
"Yes." His hand moved from her forehead to the cloth tied over her face, tugging it free and probing the area around her eye with gently fingers. "Does it hurt when I touch?"
"No," Arista said. "My eye..."
"Is healing."
Arista opened her mouth, her lips chapped and dry, and took a deep, shaky breath. "How long've I..."
"Since yesterday. We found you last night. It's nearly evening, now."
Arista's eye flew open, and she tried to sit up. The man held her down gently by the shoulder. "I gotta go," she stammered out. An entire day... she had missed an entire day. She had never missed a day at Gregor's before. She had gone on the days it poured down rain, on the days frost formed on the hems of her clothes, on the days she had bruises and broken bones and even the time she was bitten by a dog. She had always gone. She'd had to.
"You need to rest," the man chided. He tilted her head gently to the side and held something to her lips. "Drink."
Arista took a few sips of the thick sweet liquid and finally asked the question that had been flitting about in her mid for some time, unsure of whether it should voice itself or not. "Who're you?"
"Someone who wants you to get better. Do not worry yourself. You are safe here, I swear it. Now rest."
Arista let her eyes drift shut. She never trusted anyone, it was one of the ways she survived, but now she was so, so tired. She would sleep for a while. And then leave.
"Why..." she tried to ask. "Why..."
She drifted away after that.