Everything happened in slow motion.
The additional umbraphage, surging towards them.
Elliot’s distinct shout from afar.
The rush of wind, undoubtedly motecraft in origin, knocking them out of the way of the monster’s path. Slamming them into the ground.
Cinn being torn from Julien’s grip.
The thud of his body landing some distance away from him, the sound reverberating through Julien in continuous echoing waves.
Julien’s blood freezing as the umbraphage headed straight for Cinn, lifting his limp body from the ground as if a doll.
A smaller being, similarly shadowy yet distinctivelycat-shaped, suddenly emerged, circling the umbraphage and hissing wildly.
Darcy’s terror-laden scream could easily be heard over the commotion as the shadowy nightmare brought Cinn higher and higher, before lifting him to the part of the umbraphage’s body that could pass as its head.
No!
A sudden impact blindsided Julien, an unseen blow to the back of his head, followed by a searing burst of pain erupting across his skull. Darkness rushed in, his senses overwhelmed as the world dissolved into a void.
Every inch of his being fought to stay awake, stay awake for Cinn, stay awake to save him, even if it was the last thing he did—he’d claw his way over there if it killed him—but the battle was futile, and Julien drowned in the blackness that enveloped him in deafening silence.
thirty-two
Cinn
If Cinn was currently in the shadowrealm, it was no version he’d ever been to before.
This was… nothingness.
A soundless vacuum consisting only of unfathomable obsidian darkness that held him in a tight grip of paralysis. Any endeavour at movement was fruitless. Cinn attempted to force his mind to recall his music, any snatch of lyrics that would help to tie his floating consciousness back to reality, but none came. Even the sound of his own heartbeat was absent, leaving endless absolute silence.
Was he simply imagining the sensation of blinking? Was he presently staring at the back of his eyelids? Hard to say when his entire world was a blank canvas of blackness.
Time was an abstract concept here.
Hours, days, years could pass, could alreadyhavepassed, and Cinn would be clueless, locked in this timeless cage of eternal limbo.
Cinn felt nothing. Nothing aside from longing. Not pain, not fear, not even curiosity, butlonging.
He longed to hear the sound of his own breath, to feel the compression and expansion of his ribs as his lungs took in precious air.
He longed for his red city with its fractured moon, far preferable to this suffocating abyss of nothingness.
Longing,tinged with bitter regret.
He longed for the life he almost had, could have had.
He longed for the many people he didn’t get to say goodbye to. Tyler. All of his other London friends. Darcy and Elliot.Julien.
If this was it, if he was dead, he’d spent his last two weeks alive torturing himself and Julien for nothing.
Julien? Cinn struggled to place the name. Distantly, he became aware that he was slipping away from himself. This should have panicked him, but the further he fell, the less he felt the sense of loss.
Fragmented memories danced at the edge of his consciousness, elusive and disjointed, teasing him with fleeting images that he couldn’t even say for sure were his own.
A burnt-orange setting sun melting into London’s horizon.
