"They are. They'll understand." It wasn't the judgment of the family she stayed with that Arialla feared, not really -- she knew they'd be kind. No, the prickling shame she felt was all her own, independent of outside judgment. In that moment, unable to move, with the Ascended's teeth in her neck, she had seen herself differently: as an animal, and object, nothing but meat. Lesser. How could anyone have done this to her otherwise? And something in her insisted that everyone else must see it too. It made little sense, but "sense" had nothing to do with Arialla's feelings at the moment.
Still, she had nowhere else to go. "Thank you. I'd rather not walk the streets alone. Stormbreak?"
She'd heard of the place, but only rumors coming with the opening of the skyport: a strange, distant land; a stronghold of the Old Gods. With no Ascended. (No Abandoned, either, but she paid little attention to that part of the rumor now.) "That does sound safer ... And they would take me in?"
please don't take my sunshine away
