Location:Mid Ring, Vel'thari Containment
Date/Time:1 Frostforge, 9941 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm, Doha
The ground was wrong under her hands.
Jayde knew dirt — she had crawled through enough of it, the floor of the pits, the riverbanks of Telia, the practice yards of two lives. This was none of those. The grit between her fingers was too fine, too even, ground down to a powder that held the cold like metal. Mineral, not loam. Nothing had ever rotted here to make it soft.
She kept her hands flat against it and breathed.
That was the work, for the moment. Breathing. The headache had a shape now, which was an improvement — it had started as a white wall behind her eyes and narrowed over the last hour into something with edges, a spike driven from the crown of her skull down through the back of her teeth. Light made it worse, and she kept her eyes half-shut against the dim, letting the rest of the world come in through her skin.
