The Healing Touch by Kymie

We’d been through hellfire and back, with faces charred and bleak enough to show it. The going is harder than you’d even imagine, and perhaps the only good thing—it’s a surprise I can think that word, much less think it, after all this—is that you can emerge from the underworld as suddenly as you can slip within. I never quite realized how we entered and how we exited; the whole process is swathed in a mess of chaos, confusion, and charcoal shadows, but one thing is vivid enough. The endlessness of it all, the winding whirling labyrinths of darkness and fire—not as literally as you might be thinking. Not as literally at all.

When we emerged, I remembered how to breathe. I remembered what air was, and moonlight, and sky. I felt the embrace of God in the kiss of the breeze and the hymn of the crickets and the clicks of the night crawlers. When we stumbled to the edge of a pond in the wood, I was the first to kneel down, terrified and fascinated to see what my eyes would behold when they tried to find themselves in the water.

I didn’t recognize myself. I couldn’t. It was mind-bending just to think it; forcing recognition would probably be nothing less than mind-blowing. That’s how fearsome I looked.

Hell can do that to you, I suppose.

So I did the only thing I could. The only thing that was possible to do without thinking. I reached forward and touched the ghastly gristly remains of myself that was my reflection.

And my cries brought my countrymen to me as the incredible transformation unfurled before our eyes.

~Angreek87