Shut me up in a box of darkness. A human form carrying a narrow taper. Diane crept back to the hidden cave as dusk passed, the night thickening over Entropy's caern. She lit a candle and let it drip onto the floor, then set it in the pool of congealing wax. The tiny light flickered and she looked at the shelves of books, the old duster, the sword of sadness. A whisperlight touch on her forehead remembered. She forebore to change to a form wherein she would be able to smell the ozone tang of the inscribed sheath.
One book looked as though it had been perused not too long ago. Perhaps Leigh had read some pages. Diane examined it, finding runes therein that she had to struggle to translate. Once roughly comprehended, they still made no sense. Prophecies of ancient madness, untied to when or where they might transpire. This was no mood in which to read of the world's doom, no matter how inevitable. She set it aside for another time.
She felt a bit of the sadness swell up inside her again, as she carefully averted her gaze from the sword. Failure. She had not been able to teach HK much of anything, though she had tried. It was not that he was not intelligent; it was just that she was not a good teacher, she thought. She didn't know how to divide things up so that others could learn them. And she doubted he'd ever care enough to try for someone with more skill. There was a sense of loss she left sitting inside herself, looming and gelatinous. She skirted it cautiously.
She was avoiding a lot, inside and out. Diane felt a sense of deep frustration, and in rebellion against her instinct of yet another evasion, dove headlong into it instead. The candle flickered and went out at that moment. Utter darkness, silence broken by a few half-heard sounds indistinguishable by her deformed homid ears, closed in on her in sudden instantaniety. As if the world had gone out with the candle.
Shut up in a box of darkness alone with ravenous despairing glass shards at every edge - don't move! - she collapsed and slipped into a nightmare there, sleeping unaware and reverting to her Crinos form, so that she was trapped for it was too large to fit through the exit tunnel even had she had the thought to try to crawl through it. Instead her nightmare caught her up in a tight net and wrung her dry, then dropped her like washing into dreamless long sleep.
Diane slept well into the next day, waking only when Mouse came creeping into the hidden back cave to find her and waken her. Her head ached but she did not remember anything of the night, though she did almost-not-quite recall something that made her glad of the gift of forgetting. She gently wiped the blood from Mouse's nose, shifted to lupus form, and crept out after Mouse to eat some of the leftovers from lunch.