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Jade Cake
300b4d
You awake with a trailing, hoarse rasp, breathing life into your lungs, your heart, your brain, for the first time in what feels like... forever. Everything about you feels ice cold and dewy, and your breath—coming easier now—puffs out of you in thick cotton clouds of fog. Your body feels hollow. You have shifted someplace outside it, not quite aligned, and when you move your various limbs, they feel like they’re being pulled by a puppeteers strings and not your own sinew. You get used to the feeling quickly enough, flexing your calves, wriggling your toes, clenching your fingers into fists, and soon, the feeling fades. Realigned again. Complete.
Almost.
When you look down at yourself, you do not see yourself—the soft satin and lace chemise is not your own, nor are the leggings, or the socks, or even the shoes; these... aren’t your clothes. You’re sure you wouldn’t have dressed yourself like this, though to be honest, you’re not sure of many things right now. You find your stomach churning, and on instinct, you double over, retching bright pink into the long purple reeds, miraculously avoiding staining the Clothes-That-Aren’t-Yours. You notice, with another sickening churn, that your vomit smells strongly of over-rippened fruit. You are a stranger in your body. Nothing is as it should be. You are a stranger in your own body and your body is a prison and rot is all around you in this plain of reeds that you cannot remember, no matter how hard you try, how you got here, and you are a stranger to everything here and you cannot recall ever being as overwhelmed as you are now, which, you think bitterly, is not really saying much.
Bile swells again in your throat, and you swallow hard to keep it down. You refuse to vomit again. You don’t know what’s happening. You don’t know where to start. For the time being, you are, as icey and dewy as you awoke, frozen.
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