[color=gray][CENTER][img]https://i.imgur.com/DxXCQ1u.jpg[/img][/CENTER][indent][sub][COLOR=978184][B]Location:[/B][/COLOR] [I]Gulo Dorms - Pacific Royal Collegiate & University.[/I][/sub][sup][right][COLOR=#978184][b]Dance Monkey #4.034:[/b][/COLOR] [I]hostage.[/I][/right][/sup][/indent][center][sup][color=#2e2c2c]_____[/color][color=#373534]_____[/color][color=#403d3c]_____[/color][color=#494644]_____[/color][color=#524f4c]_____[/color][color=#5b5754]_____[/color][color=#64605d]_____[/color][color=#6e6965]_____[/color][color=#77716d]_____[/color][color=#807a75]_____[/color][color=#89837d]_____[/color][color=#928b85]_____[/color][/sup][sup][color=#9b948d]_____[/color][/sup][sup][color=#928b85]_____[/color][color=#89837d]_____[/color][color=#807a75]_____[/color][color=#77716d]_____[/color][color=#6e6965]_____[/color][color=#64605d]_____[/color][color=#5b5754]_____[/color][color=#524f4c]_____[/color][color=#494644]_____[/color][color=#403d3c]_____[/color][color=#373534]_____[/color][color=#2e2c2c]_____[/color][/sup][/center][INDENT][sub][color=#978184][B]Interaction(s):[/B][/COLOR] -[/sub][SUP][RIGHT][COLOR=#978184][b]Previously:[/b][/COLOR] [color=gray][I]atlantic.[/I][/color][/right][/SUP]
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		[color=000000][i]Dear Ms. Cahors,[/i]

	[i]You don’t know me, but I know you, and I know of your daughter. I have seen what the world has done to her and I have seen the countless lives she will touch.[/i][/color]

There is a tale Amma often thought of, not just of the forsaken soul cast away from on high that sought the love of life lost and forsaken, but rather a unique telling that artfully depicted the herald of a crown, sword, scales, and a bow. A chalice too that tipped over and spilled forth torrents of blood and from the depths of conspired life, the manifest of many heads and serpentine necks writhing through the flames of both crimson and silver, edged out into the void as blue eyes attached to the many faces of a beast gazed upon her from yonder the obsidian that rose on the foundations of her bones. There are cracks through the forsaken gloom, wed to the discrepancies gorged upon her heart, her soul of souls malformed and misshapen. Pieces of herself suddenly lost, given to others, tendrils of scarlet thread that looped through her trembling fingers as lines that fled off into the distance unknown and bound Amma to obligated miseries and connections she would’ve rather seen burned once upon a time.

Ashes to ashes.

	[color=000000][i]The terrible power she will come to bear is the likeness that no child should ever have to endure. Though not her fault, it will slowly destroy her.[/i][/color]

She feels as if she is missing something. Something, or someone, that had taken away a fragment of self from things she cannot begin to understand: the chalice now tipped over, the remnants of a person lost within and without. The coils of her powers then sputter and crackle, lightning fragments summoned and a face like her own looming forth and wrought with terrible laughter. It is her face, but then not; it is a shadow - an Apparition - that leeches upon the display of scarlet miasma that feathers from her parted lips on a shaky exhale. Fogging through the shower's steam, Amma slowly succumbs to her knees as water pelts and pounds over her supple shoulders. Heat sluices through her entire body; it runs rampant through her veins in fiendish lines of hate and despair, the laughter slowly spinning and pinpointing to a ringing cruelty that shatters betwixt her ears and cradles her head within her palms.

	[color=000000][i]We can help her. I can help her. There are ways to curb and mentor her abilities, ways that we can take what I know it is you fear and guide her to peace. [/i]
	[i]For I know what happened at the church.[/i][/color]

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, heavy is the heart that beholds the scepter, or would she better yet dub it the sword, and heavy is the hand that reaps, pillages, and destroys. The scales are tipped all to one side, plummeted to the edge of her heart, and the bow is pulled taut, like her spine, curving inward until it sings and snaps, and there it unleashes spindles of black in the form of her memories that pulse in tandem with her erratic heart. Eclipses of a child screaming to the stars above and lost at sea, a girl barely in her teen years who smiles with others gathered around her –

She had friends once, she thinks. Their faces blurred into monochromatic discrepancies, shadowed profiles of those who had gone missing over the years, people she knew once but whose names she could not remember.

 	[color=#978184]“What is happening to me?”[/color] Amma whispers to the tiles of her shower, only for the rising steam to answer; the hissing water drenches over her scars, the deepest ones on her back emblazoned anew, parts of her skin and body that she cannot feel sometimes, parts of her that twitch and ache and pulse every time she uses her powers. The world is quiet, silent.

	[color=000000][i]They will come for her, but you mustn’t allow them to take her. There are many things at work that they cannot stop; they don’t know what is coming.[/i][/color]

The world is afraid.
Afraid of her - terrified for her.

	[color=#978184]“Why can’t I remember?” [/color]She blames the shower, she blames the heat, and she blames everything else as Amma struggles to contain the rage within. She wants to wail for a life lost and a love she could have had; she wants to scream for the lives she has taken and only the few she has spared; she gasps and wheezes for the role she has to play.

	[color=000000][i]But I do. There’s only so much I can say, and even then, I should not be writing this letter, but I cannot bear the truths and lies I have seen lain bare in your daughter’s life.[/i][/color]

She cries now because she is positively incensed and can do nothing about it.

The morning and the calm and peace she had found there suddenly seemed so far away. 
And it is his face she sees as she closes her eyes on the last of her tears.

	[color=#fce205][i]Mend. Instead of sunder.[/i][/color]

Amma tips her face up to the shower and allows the heated water to spell away her sorrows, a baptism of fire as she cranks up the heat and steam blooms and rises like smoke where fragmented lines of black rise with whipping tendrils of red, each line snaked across the tiles as vengeful serpents as everything around her splinters, cracks, and shatters. Ashen remains dotted upon her fanning lashes, a glowing haze of red that descended upon her cheeks from the shimmering depths of hellfire captured within her gaze. Her power writhes down her body, through her scar over the betrayal of her devastated heart, wisps of posturing crimson malice that fall over her breasts, down her torso, slide throughout her curves, and highlight every single scar that Amma has ever suffered in life — too many to count, too many to place.

	[color=000000][i]I implore you to allow her to attend Pacific Royal Collegiate & University, a safe place for her and even for you, if you wish. I promise I will not allow anything bad to happen to her.[/i][/color]

With aching slowness, she braces her palms against the broken tile and stands to her full height. The weight of her hair dripped over her bunched shoulders, and the ringing betwixt her ears challenged the noise of the sputtering shower head as she carefully turned the water off and breaths around the sensitivity of her skin flushed pink. Amma moves with a sluggishness that betrays her usual grace, slumberous gestures that fumble through the heated air and snag against a towel before she drags it over her figure, down over her thighs, and back up her curves whilst her mind spirals with the disparity of answers being cruelly denied to her. If anything, she now only had more questions that reaffirmed the eternal inquiry she had for her mother: [i]why?[/i]

A question that she also had for her father.

If the second letter was indeed from him, she had to wonder if he too was aware of what she had endured in the darkest recesses of The Foundation. If he and her mother had willingly subjected her to those tortures, Amma was uncertain of what she would do if she had found them, for the sense of betrayal that twisted her features into a reflection of anguish was a weight almost too great to bear. Above all, though, it made her angry; it took her pain and spun it into a likeness of war, rage, a tumultuous fury that shook through her arms as she regarded the harbinger reflected with nearly blood-shot eyes. And why strike out his name? Another secret, another unknown to pile on top of all the things she could not remember, like a pile of bleached bones picked clean and surrounded by great winged creatures of malformed vipers and vultures beset with eyes of blue and red and wreathed in silver. 

Would any of it matter, though? Did any of it matter for the role she had to play, the script she adhered to, the tune she succumbed to, and the voices in her head as lines fed to her? Was allowing the past unknown really how she wanted to live her life? Is it irony coated on her tongue as Gil’s words and admissions attach themselves to her circumstances? Did he see something that she could not? Did Haven and Rory? Katja? Lorcán? Aurora and perhaps Sierra too? What did Harper see, with those eyes of hers? Or was that wishful thinking, to assume another could look yonder their own twisted demons and burdens of life, a similar reproach to herself as there was little beyond the obsidian wall that shored itself around her heart with looming chasms and bridges that others stood across from; seeking, yearning, hoping to breach that stalwart conviction that wavered with the dissipating heat of her shower.

Amma stepped back, palms caressing over her abdomen, a long mirror situated off the side that allowed her to study her profile and every stark, raised line of ink she commissioned to reclaim ownership of her body. Every piece was a story inlaid with sorrows, the peculiar and intricate knots over her shoulders where hands had gripped, shoved, and bit. Further down the planes of her slender back, where abstract coils splintered off from her spine and dipped into the horrid scars courtesy of the many times she had been flayed open, her powers erratic and screeching for the abysmal agony that had stolen time and reason from her. She could scarcely remember some of them, along with the peculiar and elongated scars that donned her thighs that she carefully traced over with similarly scarred fingers. Circular ones too that dotted her arms, her hips, and slender, jagged edges over her ribs; she had implored various artists to mark her body, and had seethed at the idea of more needles in her skin, but there was a resurrection found within the deeply seeded ink. Finally, she stilled, fingers curled over her chest, studying the latest scar that bisected the moth usually spread aloft there, horridly marked and split, the curvature of the wound slanted up over her heart; a perfect line, courtesy of abilities that mirrored her own, a figment of pure chaos that pulsated with the truth unknown. 

There was only one place on her body that had never been marked: the back of her neck to where, even now, she ghosted fingers towards her nape and stilled. A spear of dread sheered through her limb, and she immediately dropped her hand, palming it over the shudder that flitted away through her other arm. There she stood, studying the paleness of her complexion and the stark netherworld of black lines she proudly displayed, scars and all. The dress she had chosen would reveal these haunts, and that revelation bid Amma to study herself with more critical attention than before. The world would tremble in her wake of rage and anger for the answers denied to her; she would scour the world as a beast bitterly owed the destruction and revenge indebted to her. For she was struck with vanity, hubris, and a glutton for the insatiable wants of life, she knows all this and does not care; the sins of humanity sparing little to her revere. Amma took what she wanted in retribution for the brutality of fate and destiny that took everything from her. Seductive coils of red rose through the barriers of the world, HZEs pulsating in flashes of silver through her entire room, thirty-three feet of pure power that undulated as wraiths with little inhibition as she worked through her hair, brushing eagerly through the mass in preparations to dry it. She would later don her face with blacks and golds, feathered out edges of cosmetics and smokey shadows, a halo of gold on the center, dramatic black lines sharpened with efficiency, and those fanning lashes spiked and curled and lifted upon the blue of her eyes. She highlighted gold upon the apex of her brow, cheeks, and later on delicate collar bones. She aggressively palmed her body to shimmer and glow, and when she turned to regard herself once more, she stood naked as a babe, but through the gloom of her aching heart, she shined. 

She knew not what was happening to her; she knew not what this life held for her nor the truth from all the lies. The letters lay as they were, at her feet, wrought through with shimmering lines of hated crimson, and carefully, she stepped over them and regarded the silk lain across her bed, the uniform still left beside it, and the chains that glimmered through the sunset that poured into her room, bathing her in vermillion leagues of fire. Her phone vibrated across her desk, a subtle glow under the rays of light that reminded her to head toward the Myotis dorms, where she had agreed to get ready with the others.

And so she would gild herself as if for battle, for Amma Cahors would be nothing short of [i]devastating[/i]. 


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