Chapter Text
The weeks after the intervention passed by at an almost painfully slow crawl for Sylvia, though she barely remembered the specifics. She hated hospitals, and this experience would definitely not change the opinion formed centuries ago. Logically she knew it was a good thing, being at the hospital, locked up away from temptation.
Logic was not what defined her actions in the days spent in that bed.
If you were to ask her how it felt, she would tell you that withdrawal was almost worse than just the after effects of taking the distilled magic. The first thing that hit her was the bone deep lethargy. Her system had become so used to that constant influx of pure energy that when it was suddenly deprived of it, it couldn’t make up the remainder. Some days it took all the energy she had just to answer the doctor’s questions. She spent a lot of time on those days just staring up at the ceiling, hardly moving, appearing for all intents and purposes like a corpse. She gave quite a few people heart attacks on those days.
She couldn’t muster the energy to care.
The second side effect of the detox process was the pain. Feeling like her whole body was on fire, like she was burning away without the magic to sustain her. Every single one of her nerve endings screamed at her and she couldn’t do anything about it. When it wasn’t pain, it was pins and needles throughout her whole body; from the tips of her fingers to her very veins. The twitching and spasms didn’t help with either problem.
Sleep was difficult for her, both falling and staying asleep. The pain kept her awake most nights, tossing and turning as much as her tired body would allow. Nightmares plagued her during the nights when she did manage to fall deep enough into the dreamlands, shadows dancing in the corners of her vision that taunted her for her weakness. Whether it was for using the substance in the first place or letting her family take her away from it was never quite clear. The shadows followed her into the waking world some days, taunting taunting taunting and why couldn’t they just stop?
She remembered getting unreasonably angry at some point. The urge to scream at anyone who so much as looked at her but lacking the energy to do so, instead glaring holes in them until they left her to rage at the shadows. This feeling was rare, thank the gods, but irritability was more constant than the rage that gripped her in those few moments.
Sylvia spent a few weeks in the hospital as her body got used to running without the constant thrum of magic underneath her skin before she was discharged. She thought things would go back to normal, and in some ways they did. But it was wistful thinking to believe nothing would change in the aftermath.