Pain followed, dragging me down. It centred on my shoulder—a serrated pulse. Wrong. Acute. A sensation of something shifting beneath the skin, thrashing against the bone.
Lifting my eyelids was like hoisting iron shutters. The world was a liquid smear of white ceiling and blurred motion. Someone leaned over me. The shape was broad, the scent a mix of old books, clean laundry, and burnt toast.
Dad.
His face swam into focus for a single, terrible second. The lines around his eyes were canyons, his mouth a grim slash of suppressed panic. Fear poured from him in cold tides, potent enough to taste.
His hand found mine, grip crushing. I tried to squeeze back, tooffer a shadow of reassurance I didn’t feel, but my fingers were clumsy strangers that refused my commands.
The world dissolved into grey static. The beep faded. I sank.
Time lost its meaning, allowing me to surface only in splintered fragments like a swimmer fighting an undertow. Each time, I found new snapshots of a reality I couldn’t hold onto.
A new voice cut through the fog. Mira’s. It was ragged, stripped of its usual brisk confidence.
“…no idea when she’ll wake up. The Calysteri doctors are baffled.”
Her face appeared above me, a pale moon with red-rimmed eyes. She had been crying. Hard. The sight twisted something deep in my chest, a dull, secondary ache that had nothing to do with my injury. I wanted to tell her to stop, that I was fine, that my mascara had probably seen worse. But the words were buried under a mountain of exhaustion.
Then a shadow fell over me. Orin. I could not focus on his face, but the vibrating energy that always clung to him hummed against my skin. He hovered close, his voice a low murmur against the steady tempo of the machines.
“…signature… like two separate storms in one jar.”
He was not talking to me. He was trying to solve me. The thought drifted through the fog—quintessentially Orin—but the effort to hold onto it was too great. The grey static rose up again, the world blurred, and I let it go.
The next time I surfaced, the room was different. The beep had settled into a soft rhythm. The blinding lights were gone, replaced by the gentle green and orange glow from the forest of machinery beside the bed.
Night. My body cast in lead, pinned to a mattress that hissed and breathed beneath me. The pain had receded to a low, thrumming bassline, managed by whatever fluid dripped steadily into my veins.
For a moment, there was a strange, quiet peace.
And then the air thinned.
Someone was here.
My thoughts drifted to my father, assuming he was napping in the visitor’s chair. But this wasn’t his presence. His worry was a frayed blanket. This was different. A block of ice in the corner.
A quiet, constant mass pressed on the air, making it thick and hard to breathe. The ambient magic filling the space, the faint traces of healers and lingering spells, all bent around this singular point of density. It was a black hole, an impossible gravity that the rest of the room seemed to tilt towards.
My gaze moved to the armchair in the corner. It remained shrouded in shadow, but I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the core, that someone was sitting there.
Watching. Waiting. Alien.
The presence was dense, solid, lacking the light blur of concealment I expected. A predatory stillness. Beside it, the storm inside me was faint, distant.
Panic, thin and brittle, tightened along my spine. I needed to see.
I fought to lift my head, to force my eyes to focus on that suffocating emptiness. The muscles in my neck screamed in protest. The glowing numbers on the monitor blurred, the lines of light stretching into a meaningless green smear.
The weight in the corner remained. Patient. Unmoving. It offered no overt threat, but its unnerving silence was a threat in itself.
Helplessness tasted like ash in my mouth. The undertow was too strong, pulling me back down into the soft, senseless dark. My body gave up. My mind followed. I sank again, the feeling of those unseen eyes on me the last thing to fade.
The monitor’srhythm kicked into a frantic beat. I woke with a gasp, the sheets clinging to me in a damp shroud.
“Dane,” I whispered. My throat was sandpaper.
A hand, warm and familiar, closed around mine. My father’s. The grip was gentle, anchoring me against the drift.
