She slowly drifted up from the deep darkness that had enshrouded her. The cold bitter, slimy feeling of the dark, gave way to a warm dry feeling. Her consciousness cautiously approached this new sensation, this new light. She had been in traps like this far too often in recent memory for her liking and even though she had taken things from each encounter, this had been by far the most taxing on her mind and body.
The sensation of solid ground under her was at first reassuring but also painful. The darkness was sliding away but she was still cautious. The ebbs and flows of the emptiness and deep haze that she had been enshrouded in still moved around her. She had to navigate the eddies and swirls with just as much caution now as when they had been of the deepest black.
She remembered her journey thus far. It had been a terrible ordeal. Thankfully, her trials and experience with Kenneth had somewhat prepared her. She knew that her mind had been fractured, in ways that she really couldn’t understand fully. She had been aware of the cold sensation, though it was just that, a sensation, not really tethered to anything physical. She had been aware of movement, though she couldn’t understand or explain where that movement came from. It was as if the darkness itself was wrapping her up, but it also slid and moved along her consciousness, at one point vile and repulsive, and then coaxing and seductive. She still wasn’t sure which of the two had scared her more.
Guiding her mind through the living void of shadow was something that took every ounce of her being, focus, and concentration. Especially since she had a duty to one who was so much weaker and proved completely unprepared for the task at hand.
She had felt for Amanda’s consciousness and not only not lose herself to the Shadows and void, but she had to find and guide Amanda to safety as well. The unknown travels of another mind that she had to guide and push and coax Amanda’s self to follow her had been almost too much, almost.
The young girl’s mind was fractured into a thousand splinters. She shouldn’t have survived the first moments of that horrific attack. It was fear that Ansuya had felt, like a match in a dark room. That total fear was a poor armor to what was happening to her and she would have succumbed and become one of the Shadows of the Whyte plain within moments. But that fear had led Ansuya to her and she had been able to gather, a small sliver at a time, the young woman’s mind and kept her from losing herself to the monstrous void that held them.
Reconstructing the young girls mind, her consciousness and total being one small sliver at a time was exhausting beyond human endurance. Ansuya had had to contend with the void and the Shadows themselves. She masked her movements, hiding in the Shadow’s own forms as she slowly guided the multitude of fragments of Amanda’s mind back to its source. The more pieces Ansuya found and slid back into place the more dangerous the movements and the trials became.
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Putting together a fractured mind was something that she had never done before. She was like a child that had been given the task of performing total reconstructive surgery, with a plastic hammer and saw from a play set. She drew heavily on what Kenneth had inadvertently taught her and she moved through the eddies and whirlpools of the shadow void with the sharp eye of a long-time mariner.
The Shadows moved the slivers of Amanda’s mind farther and farther away from its source, as soon as Ansuya had put one more piece into place, she had to reach out farther to move and guide the next one. This process was more taxing the longer it took. The more tired she became, the more the void called to her, less cold and repulsive, more warm and seductive. She had wanted nothing more than to close herself, to lose herself, to stop struggling. It would have been so much easier to do that. But then she would brush…whatever it was that allowed her to feel in this corporal form, in this dark slimy void, against another sliver of Amanda and she would refocus herself, her center, and move back to the helpless girl.
It was a slow and almost losing battle. Amanda couldn’t keep herself together. The young girl was so frightened and so completely unfamiliar with what was happening, the Shadows just moved and broke down and pulled the slivers of her fragmented mind away, almost as fast as Ansuya could put them back in place. It had been a tug of war competition that Ansuya won by sheer force of will, and it was by the barest fraction of a centimeter that her progress would have been measured.
Her iron will had allowed her to move through the void and repair what had been broken. The softly glowing essence that was Amanda had been repaired. Then it was the harder part to get the girl to move. Amanda was lost, and the influence of the Shadows was such that she had to keep the girl frightened of moving the wrong way, but not too scared to move. Fear was the only emotion that Ansuya could coax out of the girl. Between a softly growing blissful aura, or a terrified panic, that was a balance act that Ansuya had to walk, as well as moving along silently through the void that wanted nothing more than to feed on the two of them.
The path had been treacherous, and she had come close to losing Amanda in sudden maws of Shadow, or swirling whirlpools, or being sucked back down through sudden eddies that broke loose from other shades to sweep both her and Amanda away.
The hard surface along her back was comforting as well as painful. She raised a single finger and let it drop weakly. Her consciousness merged back with her body suddenly and violently as her eyes shot open. She sat bolt upright as she gasped hard and breathed heavily. Her eyes tried to look everywhere at once, she couldn’t calm down. Her heart beat a thousand times a minute. She couldn’t catch her breath.
