Chapter Sixteen
Helspira
OXYGEN FILLED HELSPIRA’Slungs with a sudden, desperate gasp, and her eyes shot open to see stars and moons hanging in a nebulous sky. Beautiful, blinking stars. Was this her paradise? Her afterlife? If so, she had some complaints. Her head and stomach hurt far more than they should’ve for what promised to be a peaceful eternity.
“Hels?”
That voice. It birthed an unexpected yet welcome bliss in her core. Maybe this was her paradise after all.
A cold hand grazed her forehead. It took her a moment to realize Sikras’s gentle fingers were sweeping sweat-soaked strands of hair from the side of her face.
“You came to visit?” she rasped, still unclear whether she lay in the land of the living or dead.
A grave breath of a laugh left him, and he retracted his hand. “Visit? I never left. I mean, I did briefly while the cleric undressed you to clean your wounds, but—”
Was that a shade of red coloring Sikras’s otherwise pale face? Helspira blinked to clear her eyes and tried to swallow.B’yehnz, her throat was drier than the barren wasteland of a Chthonian rock field. “The cleric ...” Thoughts converged, and her brows pulled together. “Am I alive?”
“Yes.”
Immense relief padded his single whispered word. It begged Helspira to twist her neck, to find his eyes in the dark. Flanked by tall torches plunged into the soil, shadows shifted over the sharp edges of Sikras’s face and shed light on his concern.
“Is Vessik dead?” she asked.
Sikras shook his head.
Her stomach dropped. Somehow the emotional turmoil cut deeper than the physical pain. “How many sentinels did we lose?”
“I overheard Rowan say a little over a dozen,” Sikras mumbled. “The cleric’s trying to keep up with the survivors, but channeling the power of a god is a lot for a mortal’s body. He has to heal in small doses.”
Slow-blooming clarity entered her mind. Her betrayal. She remembered. “I’m surprised you’re still here. I thought you’d have left.”
“How could I have left without knowing you were okay?”
The tender sincerity of his voice sent a rush of warmth through her, and she smiled.
Sikras donned a playful smirk. “Besides, Benjamin refuses to leave. Once a Red Sentinel, always a Red Sentinel, apparently even if your comrades-in-arms don’t care if you die. That man has more dignity in one metacarpal than I do my entire skeletal system.”
Helspira attempted a laugh, but it sent a ripple of pain through her torso. “I’m glad you stayed.”
“A promise is a promise.”
His words brought comfort she desperately needed. The knowledge that Nyllmas remained under threat, that Vessik was still at large, that she had used the scroll which effectively had ruined their original plan ... The future looked bleak. Surely, Banneret Rowan was steaming after the loss, and given her failure to follow through with his order, she wagered he would make do on his threat. Helspira managed a miraculous recovery only to await exile from the Red Sentinel and the threat of her and her parents being cast to Chthonia.
Her hand slid over her stomach, and she winced. A miraculous recovery, indeed. A little too miraculous.
