"She should be gone by now—"
"Is it not enough—"
The words falter, swallowed by the same heaviness that takes everything else. I no longer try to understand them.
The fire is everywhere. It is constant. It has no beginning, no end. It is not something happening to me—it is something I exist within now, something that holds me in place where nothing else remains.
My body slackens against the rope. My breath slows. The panic that had clawed at me, that had filled every space inside me, loosens its grip. It fades, piece by piece, until there is only a quiet left behind, a stillness that settles deep and unmoving.
I do not call for her again. There is no need.
The darkness within the cloth is no longer suffocating. It is soft. It closes gently, like something meant to hold rather than trap.
The world recedes. The fire continues.
A sound cuts through the dark, a broken note dragged across the sky.
Then again. A croak.
It reaches me as though through water, distant and warped, threading through the haze that has swallowed everything else.
Something strikes me, sudden and solid.
It hits against my chest, my shoulders, pressing down with weight where there had only been heat. For a moment I think it is another blow, another hand, another punishment I no longer have the strength to name, but then another impact follows, and another. The sound surrounds me, chaotic, relentless, as though the sky itself has fallen.
The flames falter as air moves, and the heat changes.
I drift, caught somewhere between breath and nothing, and a thought forms slowly, gently, without fear.
This is it. I have gone.
I am no longer there.
But the world does not fall away.
Sound returns instead.
Gasps, rising through the square like something torn open. Voices overlap, startled, no longer certain of anything.
Then light presses against my eyes. The cloth is gone.
Air rushes over my face, cooler now, carrying smoke but not the same consuming heat. The world returns in fragments—smoke first, thick and curling, then shapes moving through it, dark against the brightness. My vision struggles to hold them still. Everything flickers, breaks, reforms.
Then I see what moves above me. Around me. Black wings, dozens of them.
They descend in a storm of feathers and motion, landing against me, their bodies pressing close, crowding the space where the fire had been. Their wings beat and fold, layering over one another, smothering the flames beneath them. I feel the shift of it—the fire dulled, forced back, its bite lessening, its reach broken.
They cover me. They hold me.
The heat recedes in uneven waves, still there, still burning in places too deep to fade, but no longer rising, no longer devouring with the same hunger. Smoke curls upward through feathers and air, thinner now, broken.
I lie beneath them, their weight real. I am still here.
"What is this—"
"Drive them off—"
"Get them away—"
