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Light seared into Bradamante’s eyes. She didn’t realize she had opened them.
Her head throbbed with a pain so intense she swore she could hear the sound of it beating inside her skull.
The smell of her own vomit and blood and body waste overwhelmed the rest of her senses. She recoiled from it, repulsed by the stench of her own intimate filth. She could feel it caked against the back of her legs as she lay there, could feel the dried vomit crusting all around her lips. She wondered in a brief moment of delirium if she could step out of her skin and leave it behind, like peeling away a soiled set of clothes.
She thought she heard water splashing nearby. A light burbling, like water bubbling gently in a fountain.
She realized she was desperately thirsty. Suddenly it became the only th
