For half a second, I don’t know where I am. I sit up only aware that something has breached the thin wall I built to keep the past at bay. My body reacts before my mind does. I jerk upright, heart hammering, breath sharp and defensive.
“What?” I snap. “I’m awake—stop?—”
The rest of the words die in my throat as the world resolves.
Hard stone, soft sand and heat already assaulting my lungs. Rverre and Illadon sleep a short distance away, their chests slowly rising and falling. Korr is crouched just beyond my reach with one hand lifted. He’s not touching me, not even close, he’s just there.
I wasn’t awake. That realization comes next and is followed by something else. Shame.
“I—” I drag a hand over my face, scrubbing at the grit and the remnants of a dream that hasn’t fully released me yet. My pulse is still too fast. My skin feels tight. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t move back. He doesn’t move closer either.
“The heat is turning,” he says evenly. “If we wait longer, it will cost you more than rest will give back.”
No accusation that I didn’t take a watch as I promised and no commentary about my tone. He states facts, pure and simple. Which somehow makes it worse.
I nod sharply and push myself upright. My cloak slips, and I fix it with more care than necessary, anything to keep my hands busy. To keep from looking at him. Looking feels dangerous right now—like if I meet his eyes, he’ll see too much. The echo of the nightmare. The fracture I haven’t finished sealing back into the box where it belongs.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep again,” I say, as if that’s the problem. As if sleep is a failure instead of a necessity. “I was… resting.”
He hums quietly, a sound that might mean agreement or might mean nothing at all.
“You did not miss anything,” he says. “I would not have allowed it.”
There it is again. That certainty. That will.
It presses against something raw inside me, and I hate how much I want to lean into it. Hate how easy it would be to let someone else hold the line for once. So I don’t.
I swing my legs under me and stand, a little too fast. The world tilts for half a breath before settling. I pretend it doesn’t. More, I pretend I don’t notice the way his attention sharpens onto me.
“I’m fine,” I say, preemptively and automatically defensive.
“I know,” he replies.
I glance at him despite myself, caught off guard by the lack of challenge. He’s already turning away, scanning the horizon, giving me my space back like he never took it in the first place.
The regret hits late, sharp and unwelcome.
I didn’t want to snap at him. I didn’t want to hear my own voice edged hard and brittle in a way I recognize too well. It’s the sound I make when something gets too close to a wound that has never healed properly.
I bend to tighten my boots, focusing on the straps, on the simple mechanics of readiness. My hands shake just enough that I have to slow them down.
Control first. Feel later.
Behind me, Illadon stirs. Rverre shifts, wings flexing once before settling again. The quiet morning stretches, thin and fragile, and I realize with a small jolt that this is the first time in years that someone else decided when I should wake.
That shouldn’t matter, but it does. In that small way, the way of things that were but haven’t been in a long time.
I straighten and roll my shoulders, deliberately avoiding looking at Korr. If I do, I’ll have to acknowledge the gratitude tangled up with the irritation. The relief braided through my instinct to push him away.
Avoidance is easier. Safer.
For now, I can pretend that snapping at him was just fatigue. For now, I can keep the wall intact.
The camp that isn’t much of a camp dissolves around us as Korr repacks the meager supplies.
No one says it out loud, but we all feel the shift—the moment where stillness becomes movement and rest turns back into momentum. Illadon rises and helps Rverre to her feet before she’s fully awake. I watch from the edge of my vision while pretending not to.
