On Mount Alyppia

Revelation

Arista's heart was pounding, her breath shaky. The branch had broken... Her elbow stung now, along with her knees, they had been scraped raw against the wall. And oh, her head...

"Mountain's shadow... Are you alright?"

Arista shoved herself into a sitting position in an instant, her gaze snapping to his. It was the boy. Leonid. The stone mason. Her stone mason. He was talking. To her.

"Are you alright? Can you stand?"

She could, and she did, her movements clumsy and panicked as she backed against the wall. Her breath came in great gasps of air.

Her stonemason's eyes looked concerned. Perhaps worried? A bit relieved at seeing her on her feet, maybe. But not nearly as surprised as he should have. "I suppose you can stand, then... Are you hurt?"

He paused, and when no reply came asked awkwardly, "You... Can you talk?"

"I... Yeah, I can..." Arista took a nervous gulp. "I-I'm sorry to bother... I've gotta go." She quickly turned and wedged her foot between two bricks on the wall, pushing herself up. She had to get out of here...

"Wait," the boy pleaded. He grabbed her hand, and her every thought stilled. He was touching her. He was touching her...

The boy's warm, calloused fingers curled around her wrist, where her pulse thrummed uncontrollably. "Please, let me at least... Get you some water?"

Arista forced herself to pull her hand away. "I gotta go," she stammered. She climbed the wall quickly, finding chinks and cracks, ignoring the sting in her knees and elbows. She was crouching near the top of the wall when she froze, a hand flying to her head. Her scarf... The stiff brown fabric Vivalius had lent her had slipped away and fallen. Gone.

A breeze blew into her face, tugging at her hair and clothes, and that damning stark-white hair feathered out behind her, waving in the wind.

Both Arista's arms sprung up and wrapped around her head, fingers curling around the white tresses as if to hide them. She looked over her shoulder, and her gaze flew to the boy's dumbstruck face, for a moment. She couldn't bear to look at him, to have him look at her, for any longer than that.

Arista scrambled over the wall, landing painfully on her raw hands and knees. She pushed to herself straight up and began to run, run, run The sun was blocked from her face, and she looked up to see angry grey storm clouds covering the sky, fat raindrops falling. They splashed onto Arista's bare head as she ran, blindly, head down and fists clenched. She didn't stop until she had climbed up the side of a half-felled building and onto the roof, and then on the roof of the next building. She hurtled toward the dirty tangle of blankets shoved into a hole in the wall, where missing bricks formed a half-hidden alcove. Her nest.

Arista crawled into the mess of torn, musty cloth, collapsing onto it and trying to draw any bit of comfort from the familiar scratchy softness. She wasn't prone to crying, but now she buried her face into the crook of her arm and sobbed. Tears fell unabashedly from the one eye she had left, making the one side of her face feel empty.

Everything was wrong. Everything. Gregor was acting odd, and her eye was gone, and the stonemason boy had seen her. He had seen her hair. He would be disgusted, horrified. Just like that, the one thing, that had given her joy, gone.

Arista choked back another sob and felt for the bottle of drink she kept for emergencies. To clean out wounds and numb pain, usually, but this was pain that needed numbing as well. She took a sip, then a swig, then another and another. She wanted more, but she corked the bottle and put it away. Her thoughts had turned to liquid, yet she was still miserable.

Arista shut her eye and lay back down, her head buried in the mound of clothes, her arms wound tight around herself.

"You can be reasonable again in the morning," she told herself as she tried her hardest to drift away.