isolt griffin

To be frozen with fear.

A common enough idiom, perhaps, one that bore no strange taste to the curled tongues of the masses. And yet so often delivered bereft the terrible weight and implications of its meaning. For truly was it not a terrifying notion to be so fraught with horror that one's brain could discern no further action but to cease it entirely? To know of no greater salvation than to surrender entirely to the whims of forces writhing in the ether beyond the fortress of the body? It may have presented as naught more than a myth to some, a false axiom, but in the moments that her attacker lingers over her frame, piercing her tender flesh with knife and fang, Isolt knows that it is true. Knows that the possibility to be frozen in terror is real, for it crafts the reality within which she lingers.

The young girl's false hope is in the choked plea she offers, this single shred of further surrender appearing to be enough to elicit savage excitment on behalf of the barely-concealed beast that churns and writhes beneath the surface of her adversary's thin veneer. And in some dark and cruel trick of fate, it is the only thing that Isolt seems capable of proffering up for the sake of her own deliverance; she is helpless, wholly and completely, against the gruesome pull of the other woman's mind. She succombs to it with horrific ease, falling into the memory as if she herself had taken part in it, the recollection as crisp and vivid as if she had been there. It is the very definition of a nightmare, something so macabre that as the blonde wretch departs from her, Isolt can do naught but cast her glistening cerulean eyes to the ceiling. Dutifully do her eyes skate along the jagged length of crack there, examining the imperfection as intently as if the flaw itself might have truly mattered to her current predicament. It is instinct born of the humanity that still lingers so forthrightly in every facet of her being, her mind's inherent need to flee, to escape the carapace of her body and the peril that is its reality. In every way is she still, every piece of her frozen for the fear that she feels.

Get up.

The words pull at the fibers at the very back of her consciousness, vying for her attentions through the smog of nothingness that threatens to consume her, to leave her body vulnerable to the sordid whims of the woman who flitters about upon the fringes of her visual scope. Yet even in this instinctual miasma, this ostracized mist of denial, Isolt knows this voice... she would have known it anywhere, and neither her current predicament nor the corrosion of a thousand years could have stolen the memory of that voice from her. It is her brother's voice, his smooth yet commanding baritone buzzing at the backs of her ears, ringing with such unadulterated clarity that, had he not been deceased, Isolt might have sworn that he had whispered it into her ear.

Get up, Isolt.

Then does the whip lay its barbed kiss to her torso, the impact wrenching a strangled wail from her throat as Isolt rolls to her side, her slender frame curling in upon itself in some primative need for protection against any further caresses that she might receive. And receive them she does indeed, the wretched woman hovering above her delegating three additional strikes, the agony of the leather cords coupled with the knife still lodged securely within the sinew of her shoulder has Isolt's mind swimming in a paradoxically tumultuous emptiness as her subconscious sought the deliverance of escape once again.

GET. UP.

She rises with a display of velocity that none apart from the vampire species could have ever possessed, something buried and latent within the confines of her soul seeming to ignite at the sound of her brother's command at her ears. She is roused, poised in an instant as delicate fingers move to extract the blade from her shoulder in a single, wince-inducing moment before the blonde harlot may lay fingers to her striped and jagged flesh. Isolt takes aim, painfully aware that she may only have one chance at this, and swings her arm in a powerful arc... aiming for the villain's throat. It is known that she cannot kill a vampire this way unless she had even the barest hope of beheading her attacker, and yet surely this is as far from plausible as she could have possibly ventured. It would, however, succeed in slowing the woman if Isolt's aim was true. And, with every fraying portion of her mind and body, Isolt prayed for it...