Chapter Text
Her fingers were blue. Opening her eyes had been a tremendous effort in the first place, fighting against uncooperative eyelids that seemed almost fused together; only to be greeted with blue fingers lying in front of her face. After regarding them for a few moments, she decided to try moving them which quickly proved a mistake as blank frozen numbness dissolved into icy dagger stabbing through every joint of her hands.
The pain did help though, seeming to force her brain to lift out of the hazy numbness it had been drowning in to try and take stock of her surroundings. Threats, location, assets. The three things that had been drilled into her to assess any time she woke up somewhere unexpected.
Her threat assessment was limited by the instant discovery that her entire body was either numb and unresponsive, or painful enough to make moving almost impossible. She managed to twist her head enough to look around her surroundings and felt her chances of survival diminish even further. How the fuck had she gotten here?
Cold moonlight lit everything up from above, a malicious spotlight highlighting every barren tree, every ice tipped branch and the sinuous twisting strands of fog that twined through the bare branches. The small clearing seemed entirely encircled by the looming trees, and the pristine snow coating the ground in front of her was deep and settled, strangely malevolent for all its unsettling whiteness. There was no sign of her assailant nearby, but the cold was just as deadly a killer as a knife, and far harder to avoid at times.
Trying to sit up brought a new problem to light. She had expected the pain and stiffness, if she didn’t have hypothermia already she would be genuinely shocked, but trying to get her hands into a position to push herself upwards proved impossible. A clinking dragging sound made her look down to see heavy iron chains locked around her wrists and disappearing off the edge of the stone table she was lying upon. Trying to shift her legs discovered they were also bound and chained, and a searing flash of agony tore through her the moment she moved her left leg. Right then.
Her location was a mystery, this lonely snow filled clearing was not somewhere she had ever seen before in her life, there were no landmarks to where civilisation lay and no signs of humanoid life at all aside from her, the stone table and, as she rolled her head back the other way, a single track of footprints leading directly towards her and directly away. Well, it was a direction at least?
Assets. What did she have that could help her escape and survive? Glancing down at herself, grateful there was at least enough moonlight to see by, her jaw ticked as she noticed the dress she was wearing. Long fluttering white silk, beautifully embroidered and arranged around her. Not something she owned, or would ever voluntarily wear, and possibly the least suitable outfit for a trek through the frozen woods short of being entirely nude. She didn’t even have shoes on for fucks sake! Not to mention the conspicuous lack of weapons and gear.
With rapidly shrinking options and limited ideas she began to examine the manacles binding her wrists. If she could get them off, and the ones off her ankles, she would at least be able to get up and move, perhaps find a sturdy branch to be a crutch and begin to limp her way back towards the town? It couldn’t be too far away from here surely? Tugging at the metal showed the cold had frozen it to her skin, feathery ice covering the dull metal. It would need to be both lubricated and warmed up to even begin to move, and that at least was something within her grasp.
It was harder than she would have liked to get her fingers to wrap around the metal, the cold making every part of her agonisingly slow and unresponsive, and even after she had managed that, it took three tries before her grip was firm enough for her to achieve her aim. Jerking the manacle sideways tore the skin, as the icy bond between it and the restraint had none of the flexibility or durability it would normally have. Blood bubbled up, obscenely hot against her chilled arm and she hurriedly tilted her wrist to cover her hand in it. Hopefully this would be enough to lubricate her hand. She had known how to dislocate and relocate her thumb for years, so she should be free swiftly enough…
Her fingers were shaking, and she realised that she might have less time than she had anticipated. Already her thoughts were slowing and becoming harder to grasp, snowflakes drifting and uncertain. She had to use the blood to free her wrist, get away from here and find help. Her leg had stopped hurting, which was a good sign…or was it a bad one?
Distracted she looked away, trying to peer down at her leg from her laying down position, but she couldn’t see whatever damage had been done to it, and it didn’t seem important right now, even though a voice in the back of her mind was demanding she pay attention to it, that it was very important and she needed to pull herself together and focus or she would not be coming back from this one. The voice actually sounded familiar and she cracked a smile that hurt her frozen lips. Viago would be furious with her for letting something as mundane as the weather defeat her.
What had she been doing? Oh, right, the chains holding her down. Woozy, she looked down at her throbbing wrist, though even that pain was distant now, unimportant. Tugging at the restraint showed it certainly had more movement than before and she began the laborious process of positioning her thumb ready to dislocate it. Her leverage was less than ideal though and it was taking multiple tries to uncurl the fist she kept forming. At least the shaking had stopped now, that should make it easier.
In fact, she wasn’t feeling nearly as chilled as she had been. Her finger fell out of the fist they had been making and she stared at them, trying to recall why she had needed her hands free. Something to do with her thumb?
“S’broken…” she managed to say, nodding her head. The thumb was broken and she needed to fix it. Wait, no, her leg was broken. Or her head maybe? Her thoughts were jumbled and confused, fuzzy, like that feeling when a limb had gone to sleep and was just waking back up again. That thought made her giggle, had her brain gone to sleep and woken up?
She wanted to ask the dark figure approaching her, a long staff held in one hand and a cloak that swept against the snow dragging quietly behind him. But her mouth didn’t want to cooperate any more and so she just blinked at him instead. By the second blink everything had started to go soft and hazy around the corners of her vision, beautiful and peaceful. A wave of tiredness swept over her as she blinked a final time, perhaps this time she should just keep her eyes shut…drift away…it was so warm and peaceful. The hand against her cheek reminded her of Viago, checking she was alive after some experiment gone wrong. That was nice too.
It would all be fine.
Everything would be fine.