Work Text:
Irmaya is content with what she has, but she still feels the urge to try new things. They can afford to roam their own planet now, now that the Overlords are gone.
She goes to the base of the mountains near her village, the twisted boon that somehow spared them from most abductions and deaths. The mountains have different plants on them. Perhaps she can find new material to work with. Or new dyes that can be made without witchery involved.
There are at least two of the former at the base, a green plant with red splotches all over its leaves and a creeping moss that can be spun easily into something mimicking linen. She is not a fool, of course, she will run tests on both extensively before presenting them as something other people can wear, but there is hope. And the berries near the moss are the same ones she already knows are safe for a faded rosia color, so she gathers them into her apron’s pockets before making her way further up.
The book’s words mean almost nothing to her save for the ones she memorized that mean ‘danger’, but the drawings of each plant let her compare any new findings to see if they’ve been catalogued or not.
The flower in front of her now hasn’t been, a bright yellow, brighter than almost anything she’s seen that is not her own dye work, with speckles of blues and violets fluttering around the edges of the petals, a smoggy black at their center. They’re beautiful, they’re bigger than her hand, and they may well hold the key for a new color.
They are also, she realizes belatedly, somewhat more anchored to the vine and the mountain than she’d thought. She puts the book back in her bag to use both hands to try pulling the flower off. Nothing. She puts one foot against the rock wall of the mountainside to help. Nothing.
Frustration mounts, and she gives it one final, proper yank.
The air is flying around her, her hand feels oddly cold, and the sky is rushing into her vision.
When she comes to, her face is burning. Her arm too, but the face feels far worse. Crying does nothing to alleviate the pain.
The berries have spilled around her mostly, and she can’t gather them up with just her right hand, so she calls it a loss, makes sure the book is still in her bag, and trudges back to the village. It hurts, burns like a poker shoved through her chin up to just below her eye and her arm is on fire too, and she thinks her fingers feel oddly cold on her right side.
There are maybe twelve people of eighty-four that care enough about her to not show it on their faces that they wished she’d died on the mountain when she comes into the village proper.
When her face does heal, it heals stiffly on that side. Not a complete loss of movement, but she knows she chews oddly now, and her frown is permanent unless she forces a grin wide enough to show her molars and gums on the right side of her mouth.
She is allowed to be upset, her mother tells her. Upset that the healer still refuses to treat her, upset that people judge her for the way her eye turns inward and now for how her face doesn’t move. Mostly, Irmaya just feels the absence of sensation and wonders if it will hurt when storms come in, the way her mother’s knuckles do.
The cut runs almost perfectly against her jawline and to her ear, playing itself off as a trick of the light. She doesn’t mind. She minds that she can’t go back for the flower again.