Nor -- 01

[featherbones]

It was a sound that woke her.

Not so much its volume, as her whole world was already a cacophony of intrusive sound, but its drastic change in pitch was what roused her. The sound was a distant buzz, one of many, which suddenly focused into a sort of ping—surprisingly clear and uncommonly loud. Piercing, but so very distant.

"Servant."

She muttered the word as she woke, barely a whisper but the creature still responded, appearing in the doorway instantly and without sound. It sucked the remaining warmth from the air while it waited for command. The familiarity of it made her smile. She rolled out of her bed slowly, carefully, letting the blankets slip from feverish skin until the chill of the open air touched every part of her. The cold of the stone beneath her feet bit the hardest, grounding her as she wobbled up onto her legs.

"Lady—" the voice crooned with concern, groaning out of a dry throat that sounded as though it shaped words with currents of air instead of the solid form of a mouth.

She’d often tried to imagine if the creature even had a mouth at all. She could only guess what it looked like, wondering to herself long into the most delirious of nights. All she could ever see when she tried to look at it was fractures of light. Its broken edges vibrated against one another with the simple stress of existing, its very being made up of something that had been cracked apart and jammed back into a shape that should not be.

"Silence," she whispered, and the creature obeyed.

The distance to the window was short enough for her to cross without aid, staggering forward until her outstretched hands met the edge of the windowsill, and there she leaned. She took a moment to breathe. Instead of stone walls and a window, she saw only light that shivered with manic motion, so she shut her eyes and focused on what she could hear. Ignoring the tugs of energy on her skin, ignoring the thrum beneath her feet and deep in her lungs, she listened hard through the buzzing and hissing and shrieking of the world. Finally, she caught that one peculiar sound again, ringing above it all like the peal of a distant bell. She could imagine it clearly--some otherwordly bell, grand and glowing with ivory light in the middle of some faraway mire. It grated against her ears with the how incongruent its clean sound was compared to the discord all around her. It set her teeth on edge, rang against the bones of her jaw, and she gripped the sill tight.

"Bring me the crown."

"…Lady?" The creature stepped forward with the sound of bone clicking on polished marble.

"Find it, and bring it now."

And hurry, she thought to herself. Hurry, while it is still only one bell ringing.