i.
It was the suddenness of it she resented the most.
A distant noise approaching and a white-hot star of pain. One moment her lungs were full, her heart thrumming. She was there. And then she was not.
Or almost.
There was no struggle. Not even a last ragged song to spill from her throat.
ii.
She'd never had a name for bitterness before. Never carried the weight of such complex things. She understood clear and simple feelings. She hungered: she ate. She thirsted: she drank. When she was cold she sought the sunlight and when she was tired she curled in on herself, circled spine, warm in her own embrace.
Now she did not hunger or thirst. She did not grow cold and she did not, truly, sleep. Not for lack of trying. She curled upon herself but it didn't comfort her.
Now the complex feelings clung to her like flies and she could call them by name. But she didn't know how to shake them off. How to carry them. How to mend them.
It was unfair. And it angered her.
iii.
She heard her kin singing in the morning, their heads thrown back with abandon. But she no longer had lungs to fill with the morning breeze. No tongue, no voice. No song. No teeth to flash in the dawn.
She couldn't get close to them. When they saw her - if they saw her - they made wary noises and moved away. She understood the meaning behind those slicked ears and curled lips. She had become something unfamiliar to them. Not even a stranger of their own kind, but something stranger still.
She had no kin and her home was not her home any longer.
iv.
It was the in-between she resented the most.
She would rather be, or not be. But she was half in each and whole in neither.
The one who changed her had made her like this. She knew their face but she couldn't remember it. She knew their name but her mind wouldn't speak it. The memory was lost in the confusion and sudden violence of her almost-unbecoming.
But when she found them again, she would ask them. Why this?
Perhaps it was a cruel joke. She had a name for cruelty now, and she repeated it to herself in the dark.
v.
She had names for what she'd become, too. An eidolon. A ghost. A troubled spirit.
A cursed thing.
And yet the one who changed her had given her another name. A first name. It was all that she could truly recall of the encounter. Their parting gift.
Even in her anger, she clung to it.
Esk.
It wasn't much. But it was all she had.
vi.
It was herself she resented the most.
She wished she could forget the bitterness - but she didn't know how.
Like the scent of indigo, she and it could no longer be separated.
