Time Stamp
Sednai stumbled backwards, the pain of the blow echoing through her skull like the vibrato of a church bell on a still, autumn morning. Her boot slipped suddenly in the sludge of mud and half-melted snow, and she fell with a sickening squelch into the puddle. The goo enveloped her slowly, covering the 90 degree angle of her stomach and legs before she could stand up and flick some of the excess off.
"Fitting, isn't it?" she said with a cruel laugh, looking down on her pitifully emaciated form, now drenched in a freezing soup of mud. "What's born of mud should die in mud."
Sednai withdrew the pair of familiar, spiraled daggers from her coat, wiping them dramatically across her shoulders where a patch of dry fabric remained. She smiled a sad, nostalgic smile, a smile lined with blood and mud, a smile in front of lost goals and dreams that would always remain just as the feeble butterflies of hope that they were. She looked up at her pursuer, defiance still alight in her eyes as she raised one dagger to point directly into the center of her chest. She thrusted the knife into herself.
After years of pain, addiction, betrayal, abuse, and solitude, this, this was freedom. She smiled, her lungs filling with a slow and warm deluge of liquid.
"So be it."