One moment she's sitting in the atrium trying her best at honest and godly prayer, and the next she's digging the nails of one hand into the back of the other in an attempt to scratch that itch. It's deep, it lives deep, it's like it can't be reached but at least in this instant she isn't worrying her thumbnail down to the quick. In the next moment, gnawing her own fingers to bleeding might have been preferable as the entire room begins filling with a swirling cascade of darkness that only registers as blood when her heart drops out of her throat and she remembers the same color is currently pumping through her own veins at heightened speed. Not real, not real — she screams internally, still halfway out of her seat and scrambling up the back of the couch in a vain attempt to keep her own head above water for fear she'd drown in her own blood again. For whatever good it does.

The begging crescendos. The wave crashes.

The atrium blinks back into stark, well-lit view and Clarke is left reeling in a terrified cold sweat. And wondering — if this is godly, do I really want to believe?

But in his own seat across from her, Sheogorath, Prince of Madness sits as if nothing happened. He mumbles, mostly to himself it seems, unbothered and at ease. And while Clarke can parse the words coming from his mouth, she can't quite grasp the concept. "I — what?" she splutters, rattled discomfort folding over on itself to sound downright affronted.