Astravor: Drinker of Starlight
There’s a hush that hangs after midnight in the waters of the Everglades–a silence that isn’t truly silent, threaded with the constant, murmuring chorus of crickets and frogs. They keep time, measuring the slow, rhythmic breath of night as it passes. I wake, but not in the boathouse where I remember being chained… bound to a support beam by rusty shackles that scraped my bones each time I moved. I glance down, rubbing my wrists where the soreness still lingers. My skin feels bruised and raw and…different, somehow. Did I escape? How? Or was I…left here? I look around. The air is thick, dense with warm, damp dark–a wet heaviness I swallow down with each slow breath, tasting faintly of ancient bark and earth. My clothes are soaked, clinging to me, heavy with muck from the water that lies everywhere around me. My arms and legs are streaked with mud.
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