Aquiver awoke as water washed over her body. Thunderous and loud, it crashed against the shore, streaking the sand with foam.

Aquiver let out a groan; her body burned and shuddered. Exhaustion dribbled off her in rivulets, it weighted her down to the sand and didn't allow her to move. Her muscles stung deeply with every movement, the fight against the current had wiped away her strength.

Her throat stung with salt, she'd swallowed water and had clearly damaged it.

Everything ached, and she had several small cuts covering her body, accompanied by a few large gashes.

But none of the physical pain compared the the torment inside her head.

Aubade had been her best friend. Aubade had been a happy cat, a sensitive one too. She loved everything and everyone. She liked to sit under the morning daylight when everyone else was asleep and sing little melodies, pretending to be a bird. She smiled with her eyes whenever Sabaism called her a moth, and she laughed so loudly and so infectiously at every joke. Aubade was the colour of alabaster and seashells, she was sparkling rivers and sugary summertimes. She was perfect in every way.

But she was just too sensitive. She took everything too personally and to heart. Aubade would bruise at another's sadness, and break at her own. She couldn't stand the anger in the world, and grew bitter and sad. For moons she'd romanticise the afterlife and the goodness there, until her mind became so warped that she believed suicide would make her happy, and in some way fix the world.

That thinking was delusional.

And now Aubade was dead.

Aubade with the butterfly fur,
Aubade with the sleepy eyes.
Aubade with the cemetery joints,
Wired together with string and spiderwebs.

Aubade with the splitting skull,
Aubade with bottled bones.
Aubade with the necklace of thorns,
Digging into her bloodless body.

Aquiver couldn't even cry. Violent shivers racked her body as the cold that lay locked inside her ribs unleashed their waves of weary, waterlogged stillness. It was the kind of cold you felt when you emerged from frigid water, the kind that ran through your bone marrow and hung around you like glass.

Her best friend was dead, her best friend committed suicide. And she, Aquiver, had attempted to do the same.

It was only when she was falling when she realised that she didn't want to kill herself, she never had! She just wanted to protect the Empire from what had happened to her.

From the infection that lay cradled in her chest, a rotten and decaying secret.

The illness that ravaged the Empire the illness that made friend turn against friend and caused cats to lose all sense of morality and everything that made them feline. The illness that tapped into the darkness that lay in every cats heart. The illness that tempted the savagery within, and turned every cat into a monster.

The Empire had a name now, they called it Shyal e U'uch, translating to "sickness of the savagery inside."

Aquiver had the early stages of Shyal e U'uch. Everything keeping her felinity in place was bring stripped away, leaving painful and raw welts.
Aquiver was afflicted with Shyal e U'uch.

I am not a monster,
I am a monster.
I am not a monster,
I am.

I tried to die, to escape from what I was going to become. But I don't want to. I never wanted to. I will give myself up for experimentation, after my journey.

I'll take my quest so that I can become a Fornax of The City of Cerebral. I want to die a full Empire cat. I will die as experiment after experiment tortures the soul out of me.

Aubade, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I tried to be who you wanted me to be. And I'm so, so sorry that I failed.

The shame of what she'd done felt like fire in her chest, burning through her heart muscle.

She couldn't tell the Empire of her attempt. She wasn't in danger of doing it again, she didn't need help, she didn't need pity. She didn't want to be associated with the deed, it wasn't something she supported. She had seen it as her only option, she had let herself be swayed.

She would return to the Empire, the ghosts of what Aubade had done in her eyes. She'd tell tales of how she was trying to save Aubade, how it hadn't been she who had done it.

She came to save Aubade, and had nearly died in the process.

Aquiver stood on shaky bones, her paws barely able to be controlled. She staggered and began walking back to the dreaded water. Her heart began to pulse as imprints of the feeling of drowning latched onto her pelt.

The salty waves pulled and pushed her as she swam sloppily towards the rocks, where she'd cry for her rescue. The Empire would pluck her from the rocks, the rocks still bloodstained from what had happened several hours earlier.

______________________________________

Thank you all for finishing this, and for sticking with me throughout something that took several months when it could've taken a week.

I hope this provides insight into Aquiver's past, and something she referenced in a conversation in Saving Sable.

This is officially the end.

~ Blackbird