Location: Southern Plateau - Pacific Royal Campus
Hope In Hell #2.0033: feathering the storm.
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Interaction(s): haven. - @Skai
Previously: asunder & put through the winger.
Her whispered words of gratitude fell upon deaf ears as Amma regained her sense of self and what minuscule portions of reasoning she could bear. Her power continued to pulsate in tandem with the incredible pressure betwixt her ribs, her heart looped in red threads that cinched tight with every breath. Her fingers twitched, her palms burned, every scar laden there thrumming with whorls of scarlet as she carefully lifted her gestures and poised her nails to sink, reap, and claw through the space between them.
"I suppose," she began, wrist rotating, flesh burning, and bones cracking. "These trials have us facing against our would-be selves," Amma whispered, voice wreathed in a hoarse utterance as her glare of blue fixated upon Haven, every flicker of her lash raking her eyes over her wings, every feather, and every drip of sweat that beaded her skin. "So I'll ask: are you the real Haven Barnes?" Her inquiry speared through the operating room with a string of crimson power striking the ground at her feet where ashen remains stirred from the impact.
Gratitude began to wane into apprehension as Haven noted Ammaâs movements. With her heart still fluttering in her chest like a frightened fledgling, she couldnât help but begin to wonder the same thing about the Amma before her. The muscles in her back ached as they tensed. Her wings wanted to tuck in tightly to her back, and yet they merely twitched behind her. Theyâd been saved from being torn apart, and yet the damage had been done. She would need to rest the feathered appendages for a while until she could fly again. In the meantime they felt like dead weight on her back.
Eyes the color of a forest sunrise warily watched as Amma carved a glacial blue gaze across her body. Was it obvious that Haven was in no state to defend herself against those blood red arcs of power? Her skin was hot and clammy from fear. She hadnât looked at her wings yet, but she had an inkling that they looked like sheâd crashed into an oil rig. Her wings were in a slumped position on her back, missing feathers, with splotches of black grease⊠and now the ends of her plumage were dusted with the ashes of things that had been about to dismantle her piece by piece. The same type of ash that stirred at Ammaâs feet as her power struck the ground in a show of force.
Havenâs body wanted to flinch in response. Her mind wanted to back away. Yet her heart challenged her to remain still. Ammaâs body language expressed a threat, but her actions a moment ago proved that she wasnât here to harm. Haven couldnât allow her fear to claim her again and turn Amma against her in the process.
âDo we know each other well enough to tell the difference, anyways?â Haven began slowly. Her voice as raw as her throat felt, yet carrying the weight of her heart within its timbre. âIt seems like if the Foundation had its way, you would have let me die on that table.â An obvious shiver ran down the length of Havenâs body as she said it aloud. Her voice was softer in pitch when she spoke again.
âWhy did you save me, Amma?â
The question visibly marked her, a subtle flinch through her gestures as another lance of her power bloomed, coiling through ashes and blackened remains, stained with their eternal rest. Skeletal fissures broke through the ground, increasing their intent, seeking Haven's truth that was lain there in every word she spoke.
"If The Foundation truly had their way, you would have been dead before I got here." It is a simple fact that Amma speaks, refusing to relinquish her hold just yet, unable to quell the trembling through her fingers. As slight as it is, it is telling in the usual rigidity and grace beholden to her presence. Perhaps her earlier ordeal left more than just the laceration down her chest and those that ringed around her arms and legs.
"Why..." It's the gleaming tools, the broken restraints, those four walls, and that damned door that she sees, but it's not the brunette before her, it's not the tawny wings smothered in oil and tainted with dust. It's the child screaming a plethora of whys through her mind, shattering through her waking world with every breath.
"Does it matter?" Amma sighs, finally lowering her quivering palm, her power slowly slinking back, aloft, and snapping to her aching frame. A subtle crimson glow lined her gesture, softening to a silver lining that coiled up her arms. "Maybe it's because you're a Teammate," she snaps those words through her teeth. "Blackjack prides itself on that, does it not."
"Maybe it's because if I make it out of here without you, or anyone, they'll suspect me." Amma moves to leave, offering a final glance over her shoulder. "But, I've been there- on that table. And no one was there to save me." She leaves the horrid operating room, mindful of the bodies in the adjacent space, trying not to look at the body of the girl left mangled and gone, her wings drooped to either side, her feathers forever soiled.
"I made a promise, once," she muttered, bracing against the pain and anguish. "I promised I wouldn't leave anyone to suffer what I have, not again."
Haven didnât hide the relief that passed through her as Ammaâs power returned to her body. Her shoulders sagged, along with her wings dropping an inch lower behind her. Sheâd never seen Amma shaken this way⊠and she wasnât happy to have seen it at all. She could feel it in her chest that there was more troubling her saviour than this one act of kindness.
Everything about the withdrawn woman became clear as a cloudless sky as Amma walked through that horrible door. The pain of empathy returned again. Haven looked over the empty metal table, the broken manacles, and imagined someone much younger than herself being put through the terror that it brought her. She shook her head, taking another step away from it, and turned to leave it behind for good.
The scene in the next room was even more horrifying. Haven clutched her mouth, a sob escaping between her fingers as she pressed her back against the wall next to the door. The womanâs wings⊠It could have been her wings. Broken. Sullied.
Destroyed.
Haven trembled as she turned her gaze away. Fresh tears escaped down her cheeks and onto her hand. She pushed down the panic that threatened to consume her again and pushed herself away from the wall. Her steps were faster this time as she continued into the hallway behind Amma. She swallowed down the bile that had been inching up her throat.
It felt like sheâd left her stomach behind. A chasm filled with painful empathy taking its place instead. Haven felt it for the dead woman she left behind⊠for Amma, and for the others that Alyssa had mentioned had gone missing. It threatened to tear her soul apart, but Haven felt anger keeping it together. The same anger that sheâd kept stored deep within herself for many, many years. It stopped the flow of tears and it kept her from falling into despondence. She followed behind Amma for a few silent moments as she allowed it to rebuild her composure.
âThey named you Tiamat after they rebuilt you⊠didnât they.â It wasnât a question. The voices that echoed the name at the beginning of this, and now Ammaâs revelation, confirmed it for her. âHow come you havenât turned them to ash, too?â Her anger fueled this question, whether it lacked any social grace or sympathetic tone. Something told Haven that Amma didnât need pity, anyways.
"Yes," she doesn't hesitate to answer, the rejoinder quick and torn from her throat in a harsh, feral sound. "And no."
No one had ever asked her about her name, not this calling that whisked through her nightmares, not the slithering malice of whispers that sired through the corridors as soon as Haven spoke the words aloud. Over and over and over as they moved down the corridor, the pace set one at leisure with their particular injuries. Haven's abused wings; her broken ankle, and her body that droned with the tumultuous power that fought to maintain itself within her grasp, every panel of the wall she touched splintered with tendrils of her power that imbedded itself into the simulated construct.
And then she heard it, the boiling fury that withered away inside her dulcet tones, the sort of cadence one expected from a bird, but no, this was a furious hawk's cry that barely encroached the depths of her obvious hate. An emotion Amma knew well and harbored within the pit of her heart and soul.
"You ask a lot of questions, don't you?" Amma paused, deliberately, turning to face Haven completely where she leaned in close, her frigid glare penetrating through slivers of green and brown, peering into the reaches of her empathetic nature. "You want to know why they call me Tiamat? Why they gave me that name? Didn't Alyssa tell you enough?"
Upon her spine and tensed shoulders did those scarlet threads rise, twisting into coils of ill intent, reaching and seeking high above Haven's crown and nearly caressing over her battered and bruised wings.
"They'll get what's coming to them. They all will. Everyone." A small laugh falls from her lips, punctured by the smile that carves its way across her face. "It's all a matter of time, Haven. As part of the role I'm meant for."
"What about you, what is your role to play here?"
Haven stared back into Ammaâs eyes with an intensity that almost matched. Yet the subtle tick of a muscle in her neck gave away the wariness that Haven felt at this distance. She wasnât afraid of Amma, really, but the energy that hovered fractions away from the most precious parts of her body. Still, Ammaâs words had Haven pressing her brows together.
âWhy do I need a role to play?â Haven thought aloud, genuine frustration evident in her frown. âHave you ever thought that some of us are just trying to make a life for ourselves? That despite the pain weâve endured and might endure again, we still have hope?â
Haven suddenly thought of the bonfire again. Of Ammaâs pessimistic words. She glanced between those cold eyes and wondered if they held the power to freeze her heart.
âHow dare you try to crush our souls too.â
"Hope is fleeting, hope is a lie." Amma's words churn with a hidden frustration, witnessing the defiance that blooms within those eyes of moss and timber, a forest of secrecy, a forest that bids itself to freedom. She opens her hands, palms up, fingers splayed and blackened and red, her scars aflame with her power and the remains of blood that is not her own. The phosphorescent liquid had dried to a sickly cyan that still burned away at her wrists.
"Where was hope when they started taking away students? Where was hope when I was left alone in the dark?" Her fingers quiver, her arms wreathed in scarlet as she looms closer to Haven, her lashes peeled wide and her power inching ever closer to her precious wings. "Where was hope when The Foundation came to this island and decided to try to make it their own?"
"Need I remind you too? She didnât get it either." She whispered, "They won't let us go. They won't let you go." Delicate threads of crimson caress against the downy softness of her wings then, slick with oil that congeals some of them together, the ashes of their enemies slowly feeding into her power.
"That soul you speak so fondly of? They'll take that too. And once they do, you'll wish they had taken your life instead."
âDonât touch me.â Haven hissed a warning. Her chest rising and falling faster now that she felt Ammaâs threats. âYou didnât have anyone to help you then, but you could now.â Her voice remained tense as long as those red tendrils held themselves so close. Yet her voice didnât waver. Her defiant gaze still held strong. âThatâs what we do for each other- why we call each other teammates.â
âDonât you want someone to have your back?â
Her pupils compress to an obsidian sliver banked within a turbulent sea of blue, something there in those eternal depths that writhes and coils, awakened by the challenge of Haven's words that lance against the fortress of black and bone within and without.
"You're right, I could." Those churning threads of her power encompass the entirety of Haven's wings then, spindles of crimson energy threaded through her feathers, from primary to secondary, through every construct of muscle and bone, and weave back to the delicate radius of every barb and shaft. The HZEs that complicate and compound the waking world that quakes at her feet suddenly seeking those lain within, a brief glimpse unwarranted to the energy that genetically endows her mortal frame with the beautiful talent of flight.
"But I don't -"
Teammates.
"I don't need anyone."
Just as soon as her power had latched onto her, ignorant of Haven's plights and sensitivity, they slowly slunk back; snapping, twisting, some as leisurely twirls of authority that settled over her lithesome shoulders. Sparks of silver and red dance on her lashes as she says:
"...You remind me of someone." Amma steps back, her favored leg causing a slight limp as she continues down the corridor, turning left after a slight pause, the hall to their right dimmed in flickering light, the edges of the floor suddenly awash in blood. Waves of ruby that lap down the panels shattered and vacant, something black and horrid churning through the gloom that bubbles, oozes, wed to the darkness that howls as if starved.
"We should hurry."
Muscles that had bunched together in preparation slackened as the intrusive arcs returned to their owner. Her feathers, on the other hand, remained subtly ruffled. Haven took a long breath through her nose and slowly released it through her teeth. Her heart still thumped in her chest even after her breathing calmed. Yet somehow Haven wasnât left with a sick feeling in her stomach. It was a violation, there was no doubt about that, but it hadnât felt malicious. It felt like gentle probing. A caress of Ammaâs ions against her own, internalized within her blood, tissue, bone, and keratin. It left her grateful that she hadnât swung on Amma the moment that her power had snuck its way between her feathers. And that left her feeling just as unsettled, because she always made it clear that they wouldnât be able to do it again.
Haven didnât probe Amma further as she once again followed in her wake. The longer they stayed here, the greater the threat of this place became. Her eyes traveled to Ammaâs weakened ankle. Another spot she would have aimed for if things had turned violent moments ago. Now she wondered if she should offer help⊠The thought of being held onto again sent a shiver down her spine. Her arms would likely show bruising within a few hours from the vise-like holds that those gloves had.
She glanced to the right as she reached the corner. Then looked away from it quickly as she decided to trust Ammaâs decision. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight as she turned her back to it. She exhaled softly as she brought herself up to Ammaâs side.
âYou may not need it⊠but Iâve got your back now.â Haven murmured while her eyes scanned the impossibly clean hallway in front of them. Open doors and crossroads loomed ahead. She didnât dare to imagine what awaited them in the hidden parts of the Foundationâs maze. Otherwise the simulation might snatch it from her mind and make it reality. âConsider it a debt paid. Since you saved my life.â
She glanced Ammaâs way, so that the woman saw the truth in her eyes, and then returned her gaze to the length of halls ahead of them. She waited for Amma to set the pace for them before her own feet began to move.
"I suppose," she began, wrist rotating, flesh burning, and bones cracking. "These trials have us facing against our would-be selves," Amma whispered, voice wreathed in a hoarse utterance as her glare of blue fixated upon Haven, every flicker of her lash raking her eyes over her wings, every feather, and every drip of sweat that beaded her skin. "So I'll ask: are you the real Haven Barnes?" Her inquiry speared through the operating room with a string of crimson power striking the ground at her feet where ashen remains stirred from the impact.
Gratitude began to wane into apprehension as Haven noted Ammaâs movements. With her heart still fluttering in her chest like a frightened fledgling, she couldnât help but begin to wonder the same thing about the Amma before her. The muscles in her back ached as they tensed. Her wings wanted to tuck in tightly to her back, and yet they merely twitched behind her. Theyâd been saved from being torn apart, and yet the damage had been done. She would need to rest the feathered appendages for a while until she could fly again. In the meantime they felt like dead weight on her back.
Eyes the color of a forest sunrise warily watched as Amma carved a glacial blue gaze across her body. Was it obvious that Haven was in no state to defend herself against those blood red arcs of power? Her skin was hot and clammy from fear. She hadnât looked at her wings yet, but she had an inkling that they looked like sheâd crashed into an oil rig. Her wings were in a slumped position on her back, missing feathers, with splotches of black grease⊠and now the ends of her plumage were dusted with the ashes of things that had been about to dismantle her piece by piece. The same type of ash that stirred at Ammaâs feet as her power struck the ground in a show of force.
Havenâs body wanted to flinch in response. Her mind wanted to back away. Yet her heart challenged her to remain still. Ammaâs body language expressed a threat, but her actions a moment ago proved that she wasnât here to harm. Haven couldnât allow her fear to claim her again and turn Amma against her in the process.
âDo we know each other well enough to tell the difference, anyways?â Haven began slowly. Her voice as raw as her throat felt, yet carrying the weight of her heart within its timbre. âIt seems like if the Foundation had its way, you would have let me die on that table.â An obvious shiver ran down the length of Havenâs body as she said it aloud. Her voice was softer in pitch when she spoke again.
âWhy did you save me, Amma?â
The question visibly marked her, a subtle flinch through her gestures as another lance of her power bloomed, coiling through ashes and blackened remains, stained with their eternal rest. Skeletal fissures broke through the ground, increasing their intent, seeking Haven's truth that was lain there in every word she spoke.
"If The Foundation truly had their way, you would have been dead before I got here." It is a simple fact that Amma speaks, refusing to relinquish her hold just yet, unable to quell the trembling through her fingers. As slight as it is, it is telling in the usual rigidity and grace beholden to her presence. Perhaps her earlier ordeal left more than just the laceration down her chest and those that ringed around her arms and legs.
"Why..." It's the gleaming tools, the broken restraints, those four walls, and that damned door that she sees, but it's not the brunette before her, it's not the tawny wings smothered in oil and tainted with dust. It's the child screaming a plethora of whys through her mind, shattering through her waking world with every breath.
"Does it matter?" Amma sighs, finally lowering her quivering palm, her power slowly slinking back, aloft, and snapping to her aching frame. A subtle crimson glow lined her gesture, softening to a silver lining that coiled up her arms. "Maybe it's because you're a Teammate," she snaps those words through her teeth. "Blackjack prides itself on that, does it not."
"Maybe it's because if I make it out of here without you, or anyone, they'll suspect me." Amma moves to leave, offering a final glance over her shoulder. "But, I've been there- on that table. And no one was there to save me." She leaves the horrid operating room, mindful of the bodies in the adjacent space, trying not to look at the body of the girl left mangled and gone, her wings drooped to either side, her feathers forever soiled.
"I made a promise, once," she muttered, bracing against the pain and anguish. "I promised I wouldn't leave anyone to suffer what I have, not again."
Haven didnât hide the relief that passed through her as Ammaâs power returned to her body. Her shoulders sagged, along with her wings dropping an inch lower behind her. Sheâd never seen Amma shaken this way⊠and she wasnât happy to have seen it at all. She could feel it in her chest that there was more troubling her saviour than this one act of kindness.
Everything about the withdrawn woman became clear as a cloudless sky as Amma walked through that horrible door. The pain of empathy returned again. Haven looked over the empty metal table, the broken manacles, and imagined someone much younger than herself being put through the terror that it brought her. She shook her head, taking another step away from it, and turned to leave it behind for good.
The scene in the next room was even more horrifying. Haven clutched her mouth, a sob escaping between her fingers as she pressed her back against the wall next to the door. The womanâs wings⊠It could have been her wings. Broken. Sullied.
Destroyed.
Haven trembled as she turned her gaze away. Fresh tears escaped down her cheeks and onto her hand. She pushed down the panic that threatened to consume her again and pushed herself away from the wall. Her steps were faster this time as she continued into the hallway behind Amma. She swallowed down the bile that had been inching up her throat.
It felt like sheâd left her stomach behind. A chasm filled with painful empathy taking its place instead. Haven felt it for the dead woman she left behind⊠for Amma, and for the others that Alyssa had mentioned had gone missing. It threatened to tear her soul apart, but Haven felt anger keeping it together. The same anger that sheâd kept stored deep within herself for many, many years. It stopped the flow of tears and it kept her from falling into despondence. She followed behind Amma for a few silent moments as she allowed it to rebuild her composure.
âThey named you Tiamat after they rebuilt you⊠didnât they.â It wasnât a question. The voices that echoed the name at the beginning of this, and now Ammaâs revelation, confirmed it for her. âHow come you havenât turned them to ash, too?â Her anger fueled this question, whether it lacked any social grace or sympathetic tone. Something told Haven that Amma didnât need pity, anyways.
"Yes," she doesn't hesitate to answer, the rejoinder quick and torn from her throat in a harsh, feral sound. "And no."
No one had ever asked her about her name, not this calling that whisked through her nightmares, not the slithering malice of whispers that sired through the corridors as soon as Haven spoke the words aloud. Over and over and over as they moved down the corridor, the pace set one at leisure with their particular injuries. Haven's abused wings; her broken ankle, and her body that droned with the tumultuous power that fought to maintain itself within her grasp, every panel of the wall she touched splintered with tendrils of her power that imbedded itself into the simulated construct.
And then she heard it, the boiling fury that withered away inside her dulcet tones, the sort of cadence one expected from a bird, but no, this was a furious hawk's cry that barely encroached the depths of her obvious hate. An emotion Amma knew well and harbored within the pit of her heart and soul.
"You ask a lot of questions, don't you?" Amma paused, deliberately, turning to face Haven completely where she leaned in close, her frigid glare penetrating through slivers of green and brown, peering into the reaches of her empathetic nature. "You want to know why they call me Tiamat? Why they gave me that name? Didn't Alyssa tell you enough?"
Upon her spine and tensed shoulders did those scarlet threads rise, twisting into coils of ill intent, reaching and seeking high above Haven's crown and nearly caressing over her battered and bruised wings.
"They'll get what's coming to them. They all will. Everyone." A small laugh falls from her lips, punctured by the smile that carves its way across her face. "It's all a matter of time, Haven. As part of the role I'm meant for."
"What about you, what is your role to play here?"
Haven stared back into Ammaâs eyes with an intensity that almost matched. Yet the subtle tick of a muscle in her neck gave away the wariness that Haven felt at this distance. She wasnât afraid of Amma, really, but the energy that hovered fractions away from the most precious parts of her body. Still, Ammaâs words had Haven pressing her brows together.
âWhy do I need a role to play?â Haven thought aloud, genuine frustration evident in her frown. âHave you ever thought that some of us are just trying to make a life for ourselves? That despite the pain weâve endured and might endure again, we still have hope?â
Haven suddenly thought of the bonfire again. Of Ammaâs pessimistic words. She glanced between those cold eyes and wondered if they held the power to freeze her heart.
âHow dare you try to crush our souls too.â
"Hope is fleeting, hope is a lie." Amma's words churn with a hidden frustration, witnessing the defiance that blooms within those eyes of moss and timber, a forest of secrecy, a forest that bids itself to freedom. She opens her hands, palms up, fingers splayed and blackened and red, her scars aflame with her power and the remains of blood that is not her own. The phosphorescent liquid had dried to a sickly cyan that still burned away at her wrists.
"Where was hope when they started taking away students? Where was hope when I was left alone in the dark?" Her fingers quiver, her arms wreathed in scarlet as she looms closer to Haven, her lashes peeled wide and her power inching ever closer to her precious wings. "Where was hope when The Foundation came to this island and decided to try to make it their own?"
"Need I remind you too? She didnât get it either." She whispered, "They won't let us go. They won't let you go." Delicate threads of crimson caress against the downy softness of her wings then, slick with oil that congeals some of them together, the ashes of their enemies slowly feeding into her power.
"That soul you speak so fondly of? They'll take that too. And once they do, you'll wish they had taken your life instead."
âDonât touch me.â Haven hissed a warning. Her chest rising and falling faster now that she felt Ammaâs threats. âYou didnât have anyone to help you then, but you could now.â Her voice remained tense as long as those red tendrils held themselves so close. Yet her voice didnât waver. Her defiant gaze still held strong. âThatâs what we do for each other- why we call each other teammates.â
âDonât you want someone to have your back?â
Her pupils compress to an obsidian sliver banked within a turbulent sea of blue, something there in those eternal depths that writhes and coils, awakened by the challenge of Haven's words that lance against the fortress of black and bone within and without.
"You're right, I could." Those churning threads of her power encompass the entirety of Haven's wings then, spindles of crimson energy threaded through her feathers, from primary to secondary, through every construct of muscle and bone, and weave back to the delicate radius of every barb and shaft. The HZEs that complicate and compound the waking world that quakes at her feet suddenly seeking those lain within, a brief glimpse unwarranted to the energy that genetically endows her mortal frame with the beautiful talent of flight.
"But I don't -"
Teammates.
"I don't need anyone."
Just as soon as her power had latched onto her, ignorant of Haven's plights and sensitivity, they slowly slunk back; snapping, twisting, some as leisurely twirls of authority that settled over her lithesome shoulders. Sparks of silver and red dance on her lashes as she says:
"...You remind me of someone." Amma steps back, her favored leg causing a slight limp as she continues down the corridor, turning left after a slight pause, the hall to their right dimmed in flickering light, the edges of the floor suddenly awash in blood. Waves of ruby that lap down the panels shattered and vacant, something black and horrid churning through the gloom that bubbles, oozes, wed to the darkness that howls as if starved.
"We should hurry."
Muscles that had bunched together in preparation slackened as the intrusive arcs returned to their owner. Her feathers, on the other hand, remained subtly ruffled. Haven took a long breath through her nose and slowly released it through her teeth. Her heart still thumped in her chest even after her breathing calmed. Yet somehow Haven wasnât left with a sick feeling in her stomach. It was a violation, there was no doubt about that, but it hadnât felt malicious. It felt like gentle probing. A caress of Ammaâs ions against her own, internalized within her blood, tissue, bone, and keratin. It left her grateful that she hadnât swung on Amma the moment that her power had snuck its way between her feathers. And that left her feeling just as unsettled, because she always made it clear that they wouldnât be able to do it again.
Haven didnât probe Amma further as she once again followed in her wake. The longer they stayed here, the greater the threat of this place became. Her eyes traveled to Ammaâs weakened ankle. Another spot she would have aimed for if things had turned violent moments ago. Now she wondered if she should offer help⊠The thought of being held onto again sent a shiver down her spine. Her arms would likely show bruising within a few hours from the vise-like holds that those gloves had.
She glanced to the right as she reached the corner. Then looked away from it quickly as she decided to trust Ammaâs decision. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight as she turned her back to it. She exhaled softly as she brought herself up to Ammaâs side.
âYou may not need it⊠but Iâve got your back now.â Haven murmured while her eyes scanned the impossibly clean hallway in front of them. Open doors and crossroads loomed ahead. She didnât dare to imagine what awaited them in the hidden parts of the Foundationâs maze. Otherwise the simulation might snatch it from her mind and make it reality. âConsider it a debt paid. Since you saved my life.â
She glanced Ammaâs way, so that the woman saw the truth in her eyes, and then returned her gaze to the length of halls ahead of them. She waited for Amma to set the pace for them before her own feet began to move.
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