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a shmi is in for a bad time. (but everyone who hurt her is in for *worse*)
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Later, she won't be able to say when, exactly, she snapped.

 

She's not like most of the slaves here. Morgana hasn't been able to break her. Hasn't been able to override her, not with the pleasure of the Singing Light nor the fear of digestion nor simple force. Her worms can enter Shendi's body, but not her mind. 

That's made her valuable. Almost sheltered, really. The Humming Lord breaks a thousand slaves, and Shendi endures, and Shendi listens.

(There's another thing that makes her valuable. The Humming Lord is blind, as are all her people, her slaves, her things. As is Shendi. But while the worms can hear the faintest vibration from across the Sands, they cannot hear what Shendi does. Perhaps no one can.)

 

She listens, impassionate, as new captives are thrown in the spawning pits, to be nests or food for the ever-churning mess of juvenile worms, to be tested and raped and broken. She listens, and she sorts through them. Identifies who is useful, who is convenient, who is merely flesh. 

She listens, impassionate, to the movement of the great tunnelers through the sandstone. She listens to the distant hum of people like she once was, slaves who don't know it yet, and she answers Morgana's questions in a dull voice. 

 

She listens, and so she hears first when something changes. 

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It isn't a new sound, not really. 

Perhaps an absense of sound.

(But that's what the Humming Lord fears, isn't it? Why she keeps Shendi by her side, sheltered from anything that will break her usefulness.)

But Shendi hears/ doesn't hear, when a strange flower blooms in the desert above, where no flower should bloom. When silence falls, where no silence should be. 

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Shendi is a slave, but she's one with a long chain, and the Humming Lord's slaves have never learned to question her. 

In the end -

 

She walks out. 

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And, when Shendi gets high enough in the tunnels that the echo of stone lapses into an endless sky, that the frigid desert air envelopes her, that wind tosses her hair about her face and sand into the air - 

Then is when she finds that little silence that shouldn't be. It's not currently moving, just... Lying there, really, a shroud for yet another dead body collapsed halfway out of a strangly fleshy crevasse that goes...

Shendi can't hear where. 

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She crouches next to it. Examines it, just as quietly as it is.

And then she reaches out to touch it, a silent question in her face. 

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It feels like leather. Dry, cracked.

And then it doesn't. It feels like silk, like a flower's petal - and it tries to grab her mind - 

Fails.

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A few seconds go by before it tries a more polite nudge.

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Nope.

"What are you?"

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Grrrr.

"Lacuna," it whispers back, clearly sulking. "Who, not what."

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"We're all a what. I'm a human, and a slave."

"What are you?"

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"Power," it whispers. "Opportunity." It curls around her hand, a silent invitation. 

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"And what new collar would that lock on me?"

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A soft whisper of a laugh. 

"Once you put me on, you can never take me off."

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"And what would putting you on do?"

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"I will make you a monster. Any of your choosing."

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She grins. It isn't a nice expression. 

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"One with teeth."

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