𝑨 𝑻𝑶𝑼𝑪𝑯 𝑶𝑭 𝑫𝑨𝑹𝑲𝑵𝑬𝑺𝑺

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟖𝟏: 𝐖𝐚𝐤𝐞, 𝐖𝐚𝐥𝐤, 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐭

LILITH HAD SUCCUMBED to nothing other than sleep. Her mind, a monstrous ailment within itself had began to interpose its debasement across the entirety of her body. All things fade. Time waited for no one. The past would recede to a subtle nothing, a speck of dust or granite of rock if you were fortunate enough. Time yielded to no one. It's thinly sprawled veil across our own depiction of time provided just enough space, between the ticking fingers of a clock, that harrowing distance we once yearned to pass with haste. Within moments of steadied existence, we find ourselves forgetting our moments of haste and so too the memories that came with it.

Wake, walk, forget all the more.

She had entangled herself within this performative orbit of haste. Forgetting what she sought to remember and remembering what she sought to forget.

And between the grips of waking and remembering, rested the threshold of sleep that she so tirelessly latched onto. A formidable silence not only produced but also necessitated by Time. She gripped the blanket of sleep and silence all the same, its silk destruction falsified as cotton hope. She pulled the blanket of disillusionment up to her neck, then her chin, and sometimes over her face, hoping that she would succumb instead, to eternal sleep. She stirred in her position, sleep evaded, hesitant to open her eyes in lieu of what it meant.

Waking.

Her body threw itself against the comfort of a bed in which she sat up from, glancing around with encrusted eyes of consciousness. She sighed.

Intrinsic to all that she opposed her body lifted itself from the bed, neither warm nor cold, she was just a body and it was just a bed. Aching legs carried her across the room.

Walking.

Towards a lengthened mirror that hung, in what it thought was purpose, upon the wall. Purpose. She prodded at the mirror's prerogative for deciding what its purpose would be when she had destroyed all the purpose she had left. She stared at the entity in her place, how it mimicked her movements but had also deprived her of her smile.

Fading.

Upon seeing her unrecognisable state, it triggered a sense of recognition that she resided within Severus' room. Her presence entirely juxtaposed within the setting as everything here belonged and she wondered if she still belonged here too. A stream of unfamiliarity then coated her senses as she couldn't recall the moment in which she had delivered herself, as this unbelonging package, to this particular room.

Forgetting.

She frustratedly shook her head before stepping closer to the mirror, smoothing out her face as though it may retrieve the colour she had lost. As she contorted her body to positions that defined her shape, she winced at the notion of her bones protruding in their place. Reluctantly, she tapped the set of ribs that had slightly wedged themselves out of positioning, trailing her finger along her own bodily xylophone.

The melody it casted was tragic, a tragic reminder of what she was losing to.

Enough, she thought.

She was merely indulging in her own sorrows and disguising it as being beyond that of her own hands. Maybe Severus had been right, perhaps she did let herself fall victim to even the slightest criticism.

She had tried to distill him from her mind, to compartmentalise him away from indulgence in her sorrow. She scoffed at her foolishness for thinking that she would not return to him. A performative liar once more, but right in doing so at the time. She had already disposed of that letter to him, whereby she questioned her own prerogative, just like the mirror.