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mother dearest ততততত
Hika's hands have grown raw from digging in such a crazed manner. Her fingertips nearly bleed from a cutting rock underneath layers of shifting dirt, nails stuffed with the dark grime, her palms cramping up with the tension that tears at her muscles.
Yet she digs. She digs, and digs, and digs, only deepening herself into the grave that she's entrapped herself in. Her stomach lurches every time she fills her hand with crumbling soil from the surrounding walls, abdomen clenching as she pushes down whatever bile threatens to beat itself out of her.
The girl's chest tightens, unable to fill her starving lungs with the viscosity of such dirty air, that, or her body was so terrified that the girl forgot the only thing she needed to live, the simple, compulsory action being overtaken by the need to get out of here.
Her fingers fill themselves with dirt, grasping for the shedding walls around her as she did for the very air she seemed to lack. Hika whimpers, a suppressed scream of burning agony as a gash cuts through her palm, squeezing her wrist as she falls onto her back while tears tearing a clear path through a coating of dirt and rubble on already tarnished skin.
Inside her ears are pounding drums, shattering her mind with the heavy thuds of her heartbeat. She needs to get out of here, but she's been digging for centuries. It was as if time didn't exist, as if no matter how long-- no matter how much she dug, it would never be enough. She can't beat this, she can't get out.
Until she can. The dirt beneath her jolts forward, crunching into solid ground as it throws the girl onto her feet.
Her legs, which have thirst for solid ground since Hika could remember, act as though they've never felt it before. Fear and gratitude throw her around, the lost earthbender rolling her ankle as she's tousled on her footing.
Hika screams as the ache shoots fiery daggers into her calf, yet it lacks the viscosity that the platform soars upwards with. She winces as another scream, surrounded by sandpaper that tears at her vocal cords. She's going to crash into this horrid holes ceiling.
Hika raises her hands above her head, crashing her eyelids together with the anticipation of becoming a bug squashed between the ground and someone's foot. Forgotten by the overwhelming forces she's placed between.
Yet there's no painful impact. There's no crushed bones between the two surfaces, and there's no instantaneous end to her being. There's a brightness. A brightness that stabs her eyes with the sharpness of a masters sword. Where she has found herself-- spirits, she doesn't even know the answer to what that place was-- had been so dark that she hadn't seen her hands.
Forced into ravaged shadows, covered by inky soil that turned to a line of oil where her hand had been sliced open by what she prays was a rock, her hands are unrecognizable.
