[Solo] Rage [Strange Creature]

[Scaramouche Fandango]

The feeling she gets isn’t fear. Fear is oppressive and heavy and dark. Fear wraps you up like spidersilk, and the more you struggle against it, the stickier it is. No, this is something else, red and white and piercing, like the sun when you face east in the morning. It hurts her eyes, this feeling. They’re hot and dry, and it’s a nightmare to think.

She’s too late to save it. She was too late before the eagle struck, and there’s a part of her that knows this anger is irrational. Eagles have to eat. She didn’t know that lizard, it wasn’t a friend. But when she sees it spiralling upwards, its limp prey dripping like wet kelp from its claws, she is reminded of a time when she felt small and scared and helpless, and as her dead-sprint slows to a slow walk, she stops. How long as she chased it, and for what reason? She can’t fly, can’t leap into the air and bat the thing down. And even if she could, what of it? The lizard was dead already. She couldn’t save it. She couldn’t save herself; how could she be expected to save anyone else?

She screams.

It’s a long, piercing yell, more of a roar than a shriek, and it hurts her throat as it claws its way out. It’s a high note of frustration at… everything. At herself, for her irrationalities and inability to act in what she feels is a meaningful way. At her own healing progress for being so slow and stuttering. At the nature of predator-prey relationships. At a world that lets this sort of thing happen, that slow buildup of twisted energy into an explosion. At everything.

She screams until the taste of salt stabs her tongue, and she realizes she is weeping. When did that happen? She does not remember sadness, only the white hot lancing heat of anger. It is a moment of sheer, unbridled rage and it is something with which she has, up until now, been largely unfamiliar.

A shudder goes through her, and she takes a deep, gulping sob of a breath. She remembers again the mountains. It wasn’t just the eagle- the obelisk itself had drawn them all to rage and fury. She remembers fighting for no reason at all, and what had it gotten her in the end? A life as shattered as the obelisk.

Perhaps later she will take comfort in knowing that they’d restored the obelisk, and that she will restore her life. But her mind is not capable of registering that at the moment. No, now she’s enveloped in a red cloud, fury howling against her ribcage, beating in her belly like the wings of a furious bird.

She sinks to her knees, oblivious to the cold mud, and her breaths come hot and ragged. She will fall asleep here, she thinks, and sink into the mud. Will she rise anew, consumed by this anger, or will she cool like wood-ash, returning to wet, formless clay? The latter is preferable. She’d rather not-be than be like this, at the brutish mercy of her feelings.

(WC: 525)