But the alternative was doing nothing while it took him anyway. I would rather fight the darkness on its own ground than surrender him without trying.
There wasa place where time did not behave. I was there. Not asleep. Not awake. Not unconscious in any way that mortals would have recognized. It was something deeper, an enforced stillness imposed from the outside, layered over a mind that refused to rest.
I could feel the restraints, though there were none on my body. Fields. Dampeners. Thought-suppression lattices humming at frequencies meant to confuse, to dull, tocontain. They pressed against me like fog, blurring the edges of my awareness without extinguishing it.
They had learned something, at least. But they had not silenced me. Not fully. I was still here, still aware. Tentatively, I stretched out my mind to grasp what was around me, but I couldn't sense even the faintest trace of their presence. Not yet.
Something moved in the dark behind my eyes. Not a presence—not anymore. Not separate. It had folded inward, coiled around the fractures it had widened, settling into me like an echo that refused to fade.
Fight, it urged.
Fight what?
The question made me angry.
Rage flared, hot and sudden, burning through the fog, lighting up memories in jagged flashes: stone shattering beneath my hands, bodies breaking, the taste of power flooding my veins. The certainty of purpose. The relief of destruction.
I had beenrightthen.
Hadn't I?
I strained against the dampeners, allowing my fury to spiral outward, testing the edges of my confinement. The fields held. They always did at first.
I reached for the last thing I remembered destroying: her.
The thought surfaced, sharp and instinctive, followed by a surge of satisfaction that curdled almost immediately into confusion. Had I killed her? The image would not settle.
Sometimes I saw her clearly, small, breakable, eyes wide with something that twisted painfully in my chest. Other times, she was nothing more than a shape, a concept:the interference. The flaw. The thing that had to be eliminated so that the noise would stop.
And sometimes—sometimes I heard her voice. Not spoken aloud. Inside me.
Dravok.
The sound cut through the rage like a blade through silk.
I froze.
The fury faltered, slipped sideways into something dangerously close to panic. I grasped for the memory, for thecertainty that she was gone, that I had finished what I started—but the voice came again, softer this time.
Stay.
The word made no sense.
I snarled and tried to push it away, but the dampeners distorted the effort, scattering my thoughts instead of focusing them. Images bled together. The past folded over itself. Had she said my name like that? Had there been warmth in it? Why did the sound of ithurt?
The echo inside me shifted, sensing the disruption.She is not gone, it whispered, not in words, but in alignment. In logic, that felt inevitable.She survived. She persists. She destabilizes.
Anger surged again, hotter this time, sharpened by humiliation. I would wake. The decision came with grim clarity. I would wake. Tear through the restraints. Finish what had been interrupted. The thought brought a flicker of peace. But then something strange happened. The peace did not come from the certainty of violence.
It came fromelsewhere.
A stillness opened inside me, small and fragile, like a pocket of calm I had not noticed before. It did not demand anything. It did not urge or press. It simply…was.
The sensation startled me more than the rage ever had. I reached for it instinctively, and in doing so, brushed against something that felt like memory but refused to resolve into images.
Warmth.
Balance.
