?Troubled dreams, Alysia? You should be the one causing nightmares, not experiencing them,? Emma chided, the statement softened somewhat by a tilt of her brassy blonde head and a knowing smirk.
Her posture stiffened slightly and her eyes focused intently on the demonness, near-colorless irises fixed on crimson.
Holding Alysia's gaze, Emma's thoughts slipped easily past the lady demon's mental barriers, and she insinuated herself into the pathways she'd long ago tread into Alysia's thoughts with her own mental footprints. She gathered her presence and allowed it to expand slowly, feeling out the corners of empathic memory and crevices of subconscious thought until her mind overlay that of Alysia's.
Colors of imprisonment and lacerations and scars; scents of helpless rage and despair and jealousy; sounds of cold, ordered iron and black stone. Wistful rose-pink and sungold trailing along the edges.
Emma withdrew slightly, arching an eyebrow, letting an sense of curious, analytical criticism waft towards Alysia, an unspoken reproach, which if spoken aloud might be phrased, ?You were taught better than that!?
She broke the gaze she held captive, instead watching the drunken weaving flight of a green-and-gold butterfly.
?Without going into the mess you've let your mind become,? she declared,?I'm sure you realize that you could use to your advantage that turmoil.?
Emma absently discarded the blue-black flower, folding her hands before her, eyes still caught by the butterfly's mad dance through the nightblooms weeping in the shade. ?Anger, fear, hatred, jealousy, suffering ? well. You know how it goes, and you graduated years ago.
?You didn't ask me here to give you a refresher course on how to use negative energy to your advantage, and I doubt you're asking for a mind wipe, which would also easily solve the problem. I could cast some aspersions on the integrity of your present incarnation ? you know, that body you're wearing, I'm surprised it's still in one piece, I had no idea it would prove to be so durable! ? and maybe the degradation is causing some sort of psychic disruption, but I don't think you're going to be inclined to let me test some new formulas and see if I can duplicate that effect with the...?
Emma went on in this vein for at least five minutes, rambling as she was wont to do about some exciting but rather volatile chemical combinations extracted from a local magical font, a distant volcano, and cloning technology.
Alysia's face smoothed over into a politely bored expression, the one she used for rambling drunks and math tutors when she wasn't really listening.
?... but altogether, I think the fact that you'd have to terminate your current incarnation first would not be the result you're after, since death can be so messy and awkward to explain after the fact. You weren't really listening, were you??
?Mm.? A noncommittal nod.
She watched the green-and-gold butterfly flap its jewelled wings frantically as it slid into the dew-soaked mouth of a nightbloom, its spindly legs sliding and scrabbling helplessly to the tune of cheerful morning birdsong.
?How exactly do you want me to help you, Alysia??
