It isn't that Kaz considers himself much of a coward, but what started as an off smell has turned into days with little food because even crackers taste like rotten meat and an ever increasing darkness of anger rising up within him has turned into shambling dead.
It is, in truth, his most literal worst nightmare coming true.
Decaying and rotting corpses moving through the city. Bits and pieces of them lying about in the streets, flakes of skin wafting on the breeze, and if the oddity with the food had been enough to darken his countenance to the point of obliterating all about him that wasn't Dirtyhands as others knew him, then this left him stripped bare to the boy he had once been.
It's as if the barge is welling up around him once more. The bloated weight against his skin though no one is touching him. The sharp, wet scent of pus and decay like an oily sheen coating the inside of his lungs. There's no where safe from it, and he desperately needs to be rid of it all.
Locking himself in his room, Kaz shoves cloth beneath the door, around the edges of the windows and then secures a strip of cloth over his nose and mouth after dabbing it with a scent that reminds him of safety. One he'd picked up in the market, a scent of frankincense and myrrh, oil and leather. He hadn't known them on their own, or why it brought him peace at the time. Yet it's scents of religious reverence, of guns well kept. Of Inej and Jesper.
It's with that scent filling his senses that he settles on the bed in a desperate attempt to get away from it all. He hasn't used the horizon often, but enough to know it will provide him with the distance he needs from what is going on around them. Maybe it's the cowards way out but with the dizziness that seems to overwhelm him, he knows he isn't long for the conscious world if he doesn't get away from it all.
So he closes his eyes and he centers himself. Thinking about the Crow Club. Thinking about the sound of coin and laughter and cards. A music all its own that is the music of his soul.
And he opens his eyes with a sigh of relief, shoulders slumping... until he realizes he is not standing before the Crow Club but rather along side a Suli camp. Something he's familiar with though not entirely knowledgeable. Not up-close and personal like this. Something he can only imagine belonging to one person.
"Inej?"
He isn't even sure she's there, and there's the unmistakable feeling of invading. This is her escape from the world, a place that gives her all she had taken from her, and yet in that it seems to offer him a peace from what he's running from. Not only the rot moving through the city he's come to call a new home, but the memories of death that have haunted him his entire life.
wrong domain
It is, in truth, his most literal worst nightmare coming true.
Decaying and rotting corpses moving through the city. Bits and pieces of them lying about in the streets, flakes of skin wafting on the breeze, and if the oddity with the food had been enough to darken his countenance to the point of obliterating all about him that wasn't Dirtyhands as others knew him, then this left him stripped bare to the boy he had once been.
It's as if the barge is welling up around him once more. The bloated weight against his skin though no one is touching him. The sharp, wet scent of pus and decay like an oily sheen coating the inside of his lungs. There's no where safe from it, and he desperately needs to be rid of it all.
Locking himself in his room, Kaz shoves cloth beneath the door, around the edges of the windows and then secures a strip of cloth over his nose and mouth after dabbing it with a scent that reminds him of safety. One he'd picked up in the market, a scent of frankincense and myrrh, oil and leather. He hadn't known them on their own, or why it brought him peace at the time. Yet it's scents of religious reverence, of guns well kept. Of Inej and Jesper.
It's with that scent filling his senses that he settles on the bed in a desperate attempt to get away from it all. He hasn't used the horizon often, but enough to know it will provide him with the distance he needs from what is going on around them. Maybe it's the cowards way out but with the dizziness that seems to overwhelm him, he knows he isn't long for the conscious world if he doesn't get away from it all.
So he closes his eyes and he centers himself. Thinking about the Crow Club. Thinking about the sound of coin and laughter and cards. A music all its own that is the music of his soul.
And he opens his eyes with a sigh of relief, shoulders slumping... until he realizes he is not standing before the Crow Club but rather along side a Suli camp. Something he's familiar with though not entirely knowledgeable. Not up-close and personal like this. Something he can only imagine belonging to one person.
"Inej?"
He isn't even sure she's there, and there's the unmistakable feeling of invading. This is her escape from the world, a place that gives her all she had taken from her, and yet in that it seems to offer him a peace from what he's running from. Not only the rot moving through the city he's come to call a new home, but the memories of death that have haunted him his entire life.