3rd of Vhalar, Arc 720
Soundtrack
She had soon felt exhausted, depressed, and sore everywhere imaginable. Now, two trials later, she was still struggling to manage the pain that coursed through her body as well as the tenacious thoughts ravaging her mind.
She had thought she had made amends with the stony element, had recaptured a better relationship with it, but her assumptions turned out to be completely wrong.
The Naer rested her hand in her hands and gave in to the pounding sensation that flooded through her head like a great oceanic wave. It stung particularly at the forefront of her brain, right between her eyes. She shut them, hoping that by doing so it would alleviate some of the pressure.
She wished she could drain her head of whatever it was that was making it feel so heavy, but in order to do that she would have to undergo some medical treatment, some barbaric surgery that was probably not heard of in this trial and age. A thick sickle to the brain, she mused with the dark humor that was always present like a thick fog that hung over her.
She sat back and let her head fall with her body so that she was now staring up at the tent’s ceiling. She was alone in her place of residence. Meinz was out or under in the Beneath doing gods knows what. Half the time she didn’t even know what ghosts could do, much less what her ethereal friend was up to. And half of that time she really didn’t care. Why should she be concerned about someone else when she herself was hurting so much?
She eagerly pulled her journal out from her knapsack, carefully extracting her pencil along with it. She needed to do something with her hands in a way that would distract her mind from the tumultuous and deleterious thoughts that were digging deeper graves in her head.
She opened her journal to the next blank page (which just so happened to be the second page of the journal) and placed the tip of her pencil against the empty canvas.
What would she do? What could she do? She wasn’t much of a writer and she wasn’t very good at drawing. However, like with any of her current skills, she had to have started somewhere.
As she sat, rock bottom in her thoughts, she couldn’t think of a better opportunity than to start from scratch at her hand in drawing.
She scribbled a wavy line at the bottom of her paper, a basic symbol for the ground. Then, she half heartedly created a sun with lines for rays in the top right corner. She made the sun look huge, made it cover almost half of the entire page before starting work on something else. She began to draw herself. A tiny stick figure with an enormous head that was not at all proportionate with the rest of her body.
She scrawled two very small eyeballs in the center of the head and made a dot inside both of the eye balls to resemble her irises… or pupils… or whatever they were. This was a draft, a little something she cared only to distract her mind with, not to perfect and admire in the future.
She made her arms extra long so that they were almost touching the ground underneath her, but she stopped short of them touching. In her head she thought that this represented how close she was to finally connecting with the earth, but not close enough to actually craft a relationship.
She sighed and brushed her vibrant hair out of her eyes. Her hand came away from the various strands of her hair damp. She then realized that she had brushed her fingers against her cheek which had quickly become the resting place of several salty tears. She brushed those away too, but more vigorously. She hated crying and even though she was alone and wouldn’t be seen in such a vulnerable and pathetic state, she would know and her knowing she was acting weak was enough to make her angry.
“Why can’t you just accept me?” She whispered angrily to herself. Her voice held malice, though it was directed less towards herself and more to the earth she sat on.
While there was a thin canvas barrier between her and the earth, she could still feel it creeping through, touching her… and it burned. Figuratively of course, but anything was possible when an individual’s psyche was under duress and Cierne’s psyche definitely was.
She hurriedly began etching out the ground on her paper using thick, forceful, deliberate strikes; she blacked out the bottom half of the page until the only thing that remained was her stick figure self and the sun in the sky above.
She gazed at the drawing of the sun before closing her eyes for a moment. She pictured the sun’s warmth kissing her exposed skin. The sun was hot, made of fire, an element she felt strongly positive towards. While fire had the temperament of a toddler, she believed she had a way with it. She could relate to it on a greater scale. It was more like her than earth was.
Fire was passionate, easily angered, but strong and visceral. It was emotional, but could handle itself and was not to be trifled with. Cierne was very much like that. But she was also like the earth. The earth was defiant, stubborn, but determined and headstrong just like she was. So why couldn’t she get it to understand that? Why couldn’t she connect with it in the same way as she had with the fiery element?
She mulled these things over in her mind, thankful that her darker ponderings had been pushed to the back, at least for the time being.
She wasn’t getting anywhere by thinking about these things. But sometimes progress wasn’t always visible. Sometimes progress wasn’t a monumental feat but took tiny, baby steps until it began to show. Her ruminating on the subject of her magic and the various elements that composed it was like taking tiny baby steps to a self discovery of who she was and what her relationship was like with said elements.
Perhaps the earth was so stubborn, so hard headed that it didn’t wish to be toyed with. Perhaps she was too alike the earth that they clashed. She for one would not want to be in the same room with someone exactly like herself. She loathed herself most of the time, always looking, always searching to find what was wrong with her; she always took the time to point out her flaws and never the things that made her unique. She was someone who often scolded and never praised.
And maybe that was the issue. Because she didn’t like herself, and couldn't accept herself for who she was, she failed to grasp the reins of the stony element. Perhaps if she took the time to better get to know herself, to work on her pessimistic thinking, to learn how to love herself rather than beat herself up all the time, she could come to better understand the earth and thus create a better relationship with it.
Before the ground could come to accept her, she had to accept herself.
She flipped the page of her journal, a fresh canvas, and slowly, thoughtfully, redrew the earth.
Instead of a measly wavy line, she began to create a heartfelt image of a rolling hill, a rocky terrain, and even a sinkhole like the one she had witnessed occur in Shanty a while back. She took more time drawing this go around, allowing herself to continue thinking about what the earth was like, how it wanted to be, how she saw it. Then she drew herself standing not on top of the ground, but right beside one of them. While she still did not sketch herself touching the ground, her arms were even closer than the picture that had been before.
Once finished, Cierne placed the journal down in front of her and let her pencil rest on the open page. She brought both her hands on either side of her body and let them rest cautiously against the canvas floor. She pictured her hands going through the flooring and touching the earth underneath.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to it with closed eyes. A stray tear trailed down her left cheek before falling silently next to one of her hands.
“I will better myself before I try to better my relationship with you,” she continued, her voice barely audible above the sound of croaking frogs and chirping crickets.
She had been so fearful of the earth since her last attempt at controlling it, and she still would be for a long while. The earth had scorned her, had placed a corrupted version of itself deep in the recesses of her soul, attaching itself to her defiance spark with malevolent hands- she could feel it, though she didn’t know what it was- yet regardless of what she felt and what she did not know, she allowed a small portion of herself remain open to the possibility of hope. And time.
This affliction that had been cursed upon her wouldn’t last forever, she pondered quietly to herself. The earth would eventually forgive her just as she would forgive herself.
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