THERE WAS NOrest in sleep.
No peace, no ease, no relaxing of bones, no unwinding of muscle and mind and spirit.Thiskind of sleep,thiskind of darkness, caged me like a prison.
A sealed box.
Unrelenting.
Absolute.
So complete and invasive, pooling around me like viscous blood, allowing in no light, no air, no space, no respite at all.
There was only terror. Panic climbing up my throat, knifing over skin that felt too tight for my frame, as though my flesh had contracted, screaming over my bones.
I knew I slept. Knew I was trapped in a dream. A nightmare.
I told myself this, but it offered no comfort.
I urged myself to wake, pleaded with myself to open my eyes, to sit up, to end this torment, but I could not. I was stuck, ensnared in cloying, clinging blackness. Cold and heavy as a wet blanket. Bitter as a wind that felt like needles on my flesh. This was a different kind of frigid that I had never felt before. It was the kind felt only in death, when life was slipping away, fading, gone. Vanishing like melting snow; like the slow, dissolving ebb of smoke. I knew this somehow, despite never being dead before.
I knew it as one knows how to breathe, how to blink, how to swallow. It was involuntary. Innate. I knew it as one knows things beyond oneself in a dream.
I should not feel a dream so keenly, but I did.
I should not be sostuckand unable to wake myself, but I was.
Corpse cold. So deep and thorough, the chill went past skin, past sinew and muscle, burrowing deep into my core, deep into the bone, sinking, marking … scarring.
This was death. A living death. I knew it. Recognized it on a primal level.
Stuck in a box. Not even space enough to shift my legs. A tomb without room to stretch my arms out at my sides.
Dark silence pushed all around me like hands folding together, clasping me tightly, clenching, squeezing, pushing the air out of me, crushing my ribs. Leaving only pain … the beat of my heart, the scratch of my breath.
The world,life, was too far away to reach. It didn’t belong to me anymore, or I to it. I belonged to this now. A merciless void.
The fingers of my mind ached, strained, joints cracking andpopping as I stretched, as I reached for it, for salvation, for anyone. It was just … there. A slippery tether. A faint pulse. A sleepy hum. Distant but there. An echo. A fluttering link.
Longing choked me. Longing … and regret.
So much regret, the weight of it greater even than the darkness bearing me down.
Desperately, I groped.
And touched nothing.
No air. No light. No room to move. No escape. No rescue. Buried. Existing but not living.
I WOKE WITHa scream lodged in my throat.
I caught and held it there, keeping the sound from finding air, as though that would only fuel it.
Propping myself up on my elbow in the flickering firelight, my body shook beneath a scratchy wool blanket as my gaze hopped all around me. After a while, I released a slow breath, recalling where I was.
Penterra. In the Borderlands with Stig’s soldiers—on the way to Stig. The Terror of the Borderlands.
We slept in a semicircle around a smoldering fire, several yards from the road where we had set up camp for the night. The forest rustled around us. Frode snored gently. Countless stars studded the night sky. No clouds. No mist to obscure the view. That was long gone. A thing lost with Fell.
I lowered myself back down onto my pallet, willing my racing heart to calm as I tucked my cheek into my resting palm, feeling that mark there, the slightly puckered flesh of the X a reminder of everything lost and won and lost again. It was only a nightmare. Not the first one I’d endured these many months. Nor would it be the last.
