If Sienna felt the pain as the consequence of having torn her own vessel open to summon the Unfinished Children to crack a Lesser God Witch's cage, that admission implied a counterfactual — a self in which she had not done it, a self that retrospectively wished she hadn't.
She refused that self.
She refused its existence, even the courtesy of considering it.
The mission had been hers, the decision had been hers and so was the cost of it all.
She would do it again, if asked.
Was that strange? Because she would do it again if not asked.
The reason she had been willing to trade the slow tearing of her own skin for the completion of the mission —
That was hers; it was her secret.
So the pain would not be permitted to write itself across her face. She had spent seventeen years perfecting the art of wearing a mortal mask over an immortal furnace; she would not let some leaking seam and a few cracked ribs undo the performance now.
