Kara's Blinding Pain

Adam placed his hands on either side of Kera's head. He began to concentrate, a sense of heavy focus in his dark eyes. It was almost as if he were looking through her.

“Each piece of these blades will be a strip of your soul,” he said softly. "When we are done here, you will have learned your True Name."

Kera felt as if something inside of her was welling up to the surface. It was like watching the swell of a wave from the shore. Instead of yielding, the wave exploded through her essence as Adam’s hands withdrew from her head.

Kera screamed. Bright flashes of light spidered across her vision. Her ears rang with the sound of her own voice and a sense of vertigo overtook her, sending her reeling against her own equilibrium, spiraling through nothingness, falling.

Kera dropped to her knees, holding her head. It was as if someone was trying to whisper something whilst screaming into her ear. The sound echoed through her head, strange and familiar, like the sound of an old friend calling her name, but she couldn't understand. The pain was blinding and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at all. It was as if she were being burned alive from the inside.

She fell forward onto her hands and knees, panting, trying desperately to catch her breath. The bright flashes danced through the veining in the stone floor. When she looked up, Adam stood at the forge. He was not a tall man, but today he seemed to tower high above her; taller, elder, stronger. And what was he working with? He held what might as well have been a thin piece of glass in his hands.

Laying the material across the block, Adam knelt and looked down at Kera.

"Kera." He said in a firm tone, as if to call her back from far away.

She coughed. Her throat was dry...

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...d onto her side, covering her face with her hands. She was cold but her hair was soaked with sweat and her throat burned as if she’d swallowed hot embers.

Adam knelt and held a stone cup for her to drink from. It soothed her throat and quenched her desperate thirst.

"Are you ready to go again?" He asked when she was able to hold the cup on her own.

Kera drained the cup and gave it back to him, wiping away the strands of hair that stuck to the sweat and tears on her face. She coughed and then nodded, bracing herself for what she knew was to come.

“Yes,”

Adam nodded as he set the cup aside and took up the hammer. “This is going to hurt.”

The pounding of the hammer resounded like thunder, sending her reeling again. The pain was exquisite, cleansing, sacred. And for the first time, in the 5 long years since Lucian’s death, she truly felt alive.

Kera screamed.