EU || A Start To Healing

The Handmaid's observing the pool nod to themselves, stepping away and lowering themselves to the pelts placed in a circle around the pool. A place to converse without corrupting the magic of the pool and running the memories that affect Reoseans in their everyday lives. Their conversations were soft and gentle, mindful of the memories still playing in the middle of the cavern. The slightest interruption was capable of disrupting the memory and changing it into something far more sinister than their goals of acceptance through good memories.

“She’s very close with those friends of hers.” One comments, her soft coloring one that makes many curious of how soft her fur truly is. This one tends to murmur to herself while watching the memory,guessing what could happen and how the reosean grew from the memory. From what she's seen, Karyss has grown from a bright reosean to one that's bitter and rude to strangers.

“Perhaps, but that is only one memory, and it is one where she is preparing to leave, is it not?” Another queries, her head tilted in question as she glances at the pool in the middle of the cavern that connected to the reoseans memories. When she had first come into the cavern, she was brash and rude. Did that come from the loss of her friends, or was it something different like the memories of her past coming back to haunt her?

A third shakes her head, sitting up and gesturing towards the pool as it begins to play again for their thoughts on the puller's personality. “No, she's not. Not yet. She doesn't appear quite as though she's leaving. Thinking, maybe. Stewing in older memories, perhaps. There was that darkness mentioned within the memory, but she seemed to have pushed it aside in favor of the other two surface dwellers.”

The other two pause, leaning towards the pool for a closer look while a fourth focuses on Karyss as she repeats the memory again and again. Her fur is darker, coming close to the natural browns of the cavern, with a soft purple taking up her belly and chest. “She’s tired,” she murmurs, her head tilting as she watches Karyss sit up again and again. “She's tired, but she still gives time to her companions even if it's hard to.”

The other three Haedians freeze in place, turning their gaze towards the fourth, who usually remained quiet unless there was something serious to be said. It was rare for her to even speak towards the kindest of souls. What made this one so different to make the silent one speak out?

Karyss gasps as she is drawn from the memory by her younger self, coughing and sputtering as she's left wide eyed. She had nearly forgotten that memory, once of the last from her life with Kalama and Emlien. There wasn't much left that she held dear, but her life with those two is something she wished she never lost.

“Why,” she demands as she staggers into a standing position, somehow able to stand in the pool that she had been dragged into previously. “Why would you do that?”

Her younger self turns away without saying a word, stepping out of the pool as if she were about to be dragged in herself after shoving Karyss in. “I'm sorry,” She whispers, trembling as she thinks about the memories that had changed their foundation.

Before the Blotched puller could demand what she was sorry about as she had not yet specified, she was dragged yet again into the water, into a memory where her life in Warrenfall changed forever.

Karyss curls into a tighter ball, shivering as she draws her blanket closer towards herself. She's had the blanket for years, bought from a merchant at the edge of the forest when she was younger and much colder than she currently was. It was her favorite, worn with tears on the edges but otherwise well cared for. 

“Brat!” A voice barks at her from a distance, jolting her from the burrow that she had made in order to give herself more warmth while remaining under her favorite tree in the forest. She pulls herself out, claws scrambling at the dirt between the massive tree roots before she pops her head out and surveys where her sire could be.

She shrieks, startled as she's pulled the rest of the way out of the burrow and thrown a few yards away. She lets out yelps and cries of pain as her limbs crash painfully against rocks and tree trunks. She was going to be littered with bruises, perhaps fractures if the smack to her hip against a particularly jagged rock had anything to say about it.

With her blurry vision, Karyss watches her sire approach, his unfortunate rough mood promising further trouble if she denies him relief. 

Instead, he stops, regards her in her curled form with her muffled whimpers, and sneers. “Get out. Despite all I have done for you, despite all the soul's I have fed to you in order for you to grow stronger, you remain weak.” He shakes his head as he turns his back to her while ignoring the blanket wrapped around her injured legs. She has no further use for him.

Not as she is.

Coming out of the memory, the haedians are hardly given a moment to relax as they're given reprieve before Karyss mourns the sire that should have raised her, loved her like a proper father did. 

It echoes through the caverns, pausing Haedians who had been working or piecing cloth together. Her cries were the sounds of someone who had lost someone important, someone who had cast her aside when she didn't live up to their expectations.

It was then, the Haedians realized that Karyss had built up walls to protect herself. They realized that Karyss was not as rude as they had initially believed. No, no, she was fragile and insecure, someone who doubted themselves and their actions and kept others an arm-length apart.

With them, she would heal.