Page 41 of Alchemised
An electric sconce on the wall glowed, a halo in the dark illuminating only them.
She focused on his face, trying not to see the ocean of black surrounding her.
“It was—dark,” she forced out.
“What?”
Her breathing was so rapid, her head swam.
“You’re scared of the dark?” His silver eyes were burning, his voice thick with disbelief.
She tried to pull away—she’d rather suffocate in the hallways than be near Ferron—but he didn’t let go, pulling her over to the stairs, mere steps away, and dragging her to her room, refusing to let her collapse back onto the floor.
“Calm down,” he snarled at her as soon as she was inside the familiar space.
The door slammed.
Helena dropped into the chair, doubling over and gripping the fabric. Her fingers kept twitching, sending shocks of pain to her arms, but she didn’t care. She needed to feel that things were real and tangible, not an abyss of nowhere with her body and nothing else.
The air sliced through the inside of her lungs.
She was in her room. The house had not eaten her, because houses did not eat people. Her mind cleared slowly, that suffocating terror gradually ebbing away, allowing reason to seep back in.
It was almost worse to be rational again, to sit knowing her fear made no sense. It didn’t matter. The part of her that was afraid did not care about being rational.
“What’s wrong with you?”
She started, looking up.
Ferron was still in the room, apparently having lingered to interrogate her now that her fit of panophobia was over.
She averted her eyes.
“If you won’t tell me, I’ll pull the answer out of your head.”
Helena flinched. The thought of his resonance set her teeth on edge. There were parts of her brain that still felt bruised, caved in from the transference.
Her mouth twisted, throat going taut. “I don’t like places I can’t see.”
“Since when? I haven’t noticed you keeping the light on in here constantly. Or are these shadows different?”
Heat rose across the back of her neck. She stared at the iron bars in the floor. “I know this room. It’s the places I don’t know, that I can’t see the end of. I-In the stasis tank, it was always dark no matter how hard I tried to see, and I couldn’t feel anything around me, just my body floating and not moving. It felt—endless. Like I was nowhere. I was—I was there so long. I kept thinking that eventually someone would come but—” She shook her head. “When I see dark places and I don’t know where they end, I feel like I’ll disappear inside them, but this time, I’ll never be found.”
She sounded irrational. She was irrational, but there was no help for it; there was a schism between her reason and her mind, a fault line shearing them forever apart. Her mind did not care whether the fear made sense; it just wanted to never go back.
Ferron was silent for so long that she finally looked up at him, morbidly curious, but he was unreadable. Still as a statue as he stared at her.
It was the first time she’d bothered to just look at him, to see him for what he was, rather than who he was.
His clothing hid it well, but he was strangely slight. Not at all built like an iron alchemist. He didn’t even have the look or presence of a combat alchemist. She couldn’t imagine him with a heavy weapon in hand.
Aside from the predatory intensity to his eyes, his features were almost too fine, like a statue carved a stroke too far.
Everything about him was slim and sharp-edged.
“You know,” Ferron said, jolting her from her thoughts, “when I heard it was you I’d be getting, I was looking forward to breaking you.”
He shook his head. “But I don’t think it’s possible to exceed what you’ve done to yourself.”
