[Glimpse] Beat Your Feelings

The steel on her anvil is glowing red and orange. She brings the hammer striking down onto it, the sharp sound filling the space, sparks shooting out from the point of impact. She taps her hammer on the anvil, then strikes it again. Hard. Harder than she needs to. Hoping this next strike might loosen some of the tension in her chest, the sick feeling churning in her gut.

It doesn’t. She strikes, and in the flash of sparks she sees Isla’s searing light.

Strike, and she sees Henley, flush with success after their high-speed hunt.

Strike, and she sees a deadly iron blade.

Strike, she feels the pledge wrapped around her wyrd.

Strike, she should never have done it.

Strike, it was a mistake! A mistake she’s bound to now.

Strike! She sees the secret. See’s her paranoid Freehold around her. Sees her own death if anyone comes to know of her betrayal.

Strike! The walls are closing in on her. The trap holds her tight. And she knows this, she knows this feeling. Was it her once? Was it her who lied and cheated and trapped?

Strike-strike! Maybe she deserves this.

STRIKE! This is everything she never wanted.

STRIKE STRIKE STRIKE! Eis and Blaze know, and no one else can. They should never have bargained with a fae. Never again. Never again-

“NO!” She doesn’t even realize she’s shouted the word with the fall of her hammer. This was supposed to be a sword. It will never be a sword now. She’s ruined it. Warped it under the strength of her blows. She strikes again, “NO!” and again, with each building cry, “NO! NO! NO!”

STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!

She tosses the hammer aside, it clatters onto a bed of tools, as she grips the non-sword with both gloved hands around the tang, raising it like the weapon it will never be. Trapped! Trapped and she must free herself! She screams, as she brings the sword chopping down onto the anvil. It chips at the place where the edge should be, throwing sparks, denting and bending against that unyielding edifice. Her heart thumps in her ears. So close. So distant.

She chops into the anvil again and again and again and again as she screams, loud and long and anguished, echoing into the night of her forge-Hollow. Until what could have been the sword is now a bent and battered ruin that she hurls with all her might into a nearby pond, where it lands with a huge splash and a riotous sizzle.

She’s still screaming when she pushes the anvil off it’s mount, slips, and falls opposite it, onto the cold stone floor of the Hollow. Her anger released, it flees in the face of her grief. Her fear. What will she do if she can’t find a way out of this? What will she do if someone finds out?

Why can’t she just tell people what happened? Let them see it for the mistake it was? Enlist their help to fix it? Why must she instead fear them? Fear that they’ll kill her if they come to know?

She wanted community. That’s why she’d come back into the Freehold. People to know her. People she could trust.

Laying there in her empty Hollow, Wayland presses her palms over each eye as if that can stop the tears, teeth bared in an ugly grimace as sobs wrack her body, feeling utterly alone.