Waking was no mercy; it was a violent exile.
For Isolde Vane, the moment her eyes snapped open each morning felt like a brutal, reverse enactment of drowning. In that instant, she was not surfacing to breathe, but was being hauled up from a deep, silent sea of black trees and shoved roughly back into a desiccated husk named "human."
The first lungful of air in the Wake tasted of London's pervasive mold and the bitterness of coal smoke. It felt less like sustenance and more like a sentence, a necessary punishment to maintain the illusion of being alive.
There was no Wood here. Seconds ago, she had walked barefoot through that forest without walls. In that dreaming state—perhaps the only truth—she had felt light as a drift of grey ash, filled with a chaotic, vibratory joy that needed no lungs to sustain it. But now, it was gone. Reality descended like a heavy slab of rough concrete, pinning her down.
Outside, a greasy, vicious rain smeared against the glass, filtering the meager morning light into a dirty leaden grey. Inside, the room clung to a damp smell of wet lime and the inherent rot of this cheap, late-Victorian tenement. The wallpaper was peeling in the corner like raw flesh, revealing black mold beneath that looked like an ulcerated face screaming in silence.
Isolde looked down at her palms. There were deep red indentations where she had tried to grip the dream-memory, but she held nothing. Only air.
"Too tight."
The words rasped from her throat, tearing like dry insect wings against sandpaper. The sensation permeated her entirely: her skin was no longer a protective shield, but a corset laced two sizes too small. Every muscle, every bone, screamed as they were forcibly compressed within a vessel too narrow to house the soul that had unfurled in the dream. To exist in this human guise was to endure a long, slow suffocation in a steadily shrinking room.
She drifted soundlessly to the standing mirror in the corner, a flaking relic salvaged from a flea market. A jagged crack split her reflection into halves. Once, this body had been the perfect union of strength and grace, the pride of the Royal Ballet. Every muscle had obeyed her will with the bright, ordered precision of the Lantern. Now, the pale, gaunt stranger in the glass was merely a vessel for pain.
Twisting painfully, spine clicking in protest, she twisted to inspect the souvenir. A jagged scar diagonally crawled across her spine. Three years. The sound of bones snapping like dry pasta, then darkness. Doctors called her lucky to walk. To Isolde, it was the epitaph of the ballet career, the end of the Rational.
And it itched. It itched internally, deep within the marrow where titanium screws met bone. Something sentient scrabbled beneath her scapula, pushing to breach the skin, demanding to breathe.
Scraping at the pink keloid tissue, dead skin drifted down like snow. Red welts rose rapidly, but the deep itch mocked her, burrowing deeper. Finger dug in, nails breaking the dermis. Rip. A soft, fabric-tearing sound, then a touch of warm wetness. Blood ooze from the scar fissure, a scarlet snake sliding down her white map of a spine.
Pain finally drowned the itch. Near-ecstatic trace washed over her face. That sharp sting punctured the membrane of reality, allowing her, for one blissful second, to feel the frantic vibration of the Wood again. Scarlet Grail, paper-white Winter, and between them, the writhing thing trying to break the soil: the Moth. Tasting the blood, iron and salt, she murmured, "How much longer must I wear this?"
The old clock clicked. hours. Survival Pounds needed. She washed her face in freezing water, scrubbing roughly as if trying to tear off a mask fused to her flesh. Wake. A glitch in the water droplets: mirror masks change. Compound insect eyes. coiled wet proboscis trembling in the air, tasting pheromones. Large, geometrically patterned fly wings thrum inside her skull. A deafening, internal buzzing. Blink. The gaunt former dancer was back. An ill-fitting suit of skin.
"Not yet."
She painted a scarlet wound across her pale lips with worn lipstick—Decadent vitality that The Ecdysis Club patrons desired, a corpse feeding beauty. cloak armour: Cheap synthetics, a rough black wool turtleneck. Hide the scar, hide the Moth heart fluttering frantically in her ribcage like a bird trapped in a jar.
Habitually, she grabbed the antique steel tailor shears. Pure Edge. The incarnation of severing. Not tools, but a tooth to bite back if the world tried to swallow her. Soothing the dormant hunger of the metal, she tucked them into an inner pocket against her heart. Cold, metal comfort. If the skin was too tight, she at least had the tool to rip it open.
Push the wooden door. Grey rain swallowed her. Low head, folded insect posture, merge into stream of hurried, numb walking dead. The Wake waits. But so does the change.