[Cursed Crone] Sadness

The dismal burden of melancholy settled on Arianwyn's shoulders as she the Cursed Crone; barely noticeable at first, but as the distance between them narrowed and the sky above the Silverweaver became engulphed in darkness, the visceral sadness became light a weight settled on her very form. It was crushing, such a feeling of despair that she longed to cry out or break out in a sob.

While she stifled tears that threatened, bewilderingly, to flow, Arianwyn tried to make sense of this sudden shift. She had been near enough to the Crone earlier that she had been buffeted by the meteors tossed her way. At the time, she could feel the monster's otherworldly sadness, the same way one felt a stiff breeze or a chill in the air—ever present, but easily put out of one's mind when there were greater problems to deal with. An oppressive sadness, sure, but as oppressive as a blanket in summertime, not a boulder on her chest. Now, suddenly, she felt the devastating pressure of mystical sadness, drowning her, crushing her, as though she was at the bottom of the ocean and it was choking the air from her lungs. She only noticed the wetness of her tears as she squeezed her eyes shut in a desperate attempt for a self-steeling breath. Despair had consumed her, so great in its power that she wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball in the dirt and wail.

But why? Why now? Why not earlier, when she had been well-within the monster's dark aura? What had changed?

When she blinked away the tears the continued to pour, desperately holding back sobs that would only give her position away to the Curst Crone, she found her mind drifting to the village behind her. In the flashes of her own mind, she saw the splintered houses, the generations of lives built destroyed with so little care. She saw the old woman who offered her, a stranger, kindness and supplies she had not earned. Her thoughts drifted to what had been lost: to lives buried beneath ruined homes, to death and to fields of crops left to rot by deceased farmers. She found her heart breaking for these people, for their lives that she had only gotten such a brief glance at before it was lost forever.

This beast, the Cursed Crone, cloaked herself in sadness. This was the work of corruption. Arianwyn had witnessed it herself; the people of the town gathered outside to cower and cry beneath the watch of the skull-headed behemoth. She had wondered why they hadn't run from her claws, and now realized that they simply couldn't. They were paralyzed in their own grief; stuck in their own sadness and sobs. When consumed by magical hopelessness, facing down a certain end, what point was there in running for one's life? They had been trapped there by her magic; victims of a misery so great it consumed the sorrow of others. A magic which not had its grip on Arianwyn.

At the same moment that she understood what the townspeople had been facing, Arianwyn realized why she had been spared of their affliction. For her, there had simply been no heartache to gasp. Now, she could feel the way the magic work: it weaseled its way into her mind, wraps its tendrils around her mourning of the destroyed town, and tried to pull her into the depths of her own mind. To drown her in her own sadness; accentuating the regret and anguish that her memories of the village already engendered. The Crone was using her sad memories against her.

She was affected now because, now, she had sad memories that the Crone's magic could harness. Before the destruction of the village, Arianwyn had not carried enough sadness for the corrupted magic to get a grip on her. She had not had tragedy enough to be used against her.

As an orphan, that fact alone was pretty insulting.

She found her sadness momentarily overwhelmed by questioning, confusion. Was she really not sad enough about her parents for the Crone to wield their loss as a weapon against her? Did she not care about them? No, it was impossible. Of course she was sad to have lost them. Of course she mourned their deaths! Rage blossomed within her chest, she found herself baring her teeth despite herself, cursing out the Crone and the universe and whoever else might accuse her of not grieving her parents. How dare the world even insinuate such a thing? Losing her family had been the worst day of her life.

-And yet, Arianwyn found it hard to summon sobs for them, even now, even with afflicted by the weight of otherworldly despair. Her tears had dried, and while she continued to pace towards the monster, she was lost in her own indignation. Her parents' deaths did not fill her with the raw, sharp sadness that would cause one to wail. No. She had lost them both when she was very young; hardly old enough to remember the look of their faces. She knew of them mostly from photographs, and from the tales of those who had known them. Her caretakers had spun many a story about their heroic feats: of her father's success as a professor at Namarast, of her mother's prowess on the battlefield. It occurred to her that she knew them only as symbols, legends, immutable above criticism. She knew little of who they were. She did not know them well enough to mourn their loss as an open wound, but instead as the callused ache of shoes she was desperate to one day fill.

Her heart twisted at the thought, and she found her glare narrowing in on the Cursed Crone hovering in the distant skies. She resented the monster for uncovering these feelings in her own mind, and she hated the beast for destroying the lives of innocent people. Her own rage, boiling in her blood, was enough to overcome the anguish that had gripped her so tightly; though the magic was still there, she felt her own defiance rising to push it away.

She needed to avenge these people. She needed to live to learn more about her parents, and learn to miss them, not just the legacy they left behind.