Page 118 of Kissed By the Gods
I rip open the pocket on his pack and then weave the thread through his skin in big, erratic sweeps. My fingers are clumsy and I know some of the gaps are too wide and some are too tight, the skin puckering awkwardly. There’s no time to make it neat.I’m racing against—something, but I don’t know what—to get these stitches in. I keep going until the wound is closed.
Vaeloria whinnies at my side, as if to say: quicker.
I fumble the lid of the aldersigh jar, my bloodied fingers slipping. The lid stays firmly closed.
The darkness—once my friend, now my enemy—starts to creep closer to me. I snarl at it. “Stay back! I’m not finished!”
It doesn’t listen to me. It slithers closer and closer still, the tendrils reaching out for me and Vaeloria with gnarled hands. It wraps around my feet first, then Vaeloria’s hooves.
Einarr screams, his terror a jagged knife in my heart.
Sobbing, I smash the jar of aldersigh on the stone ruins at our feet. I scoop the paste into my hands, slicing my fingers on the jagged remnants of the jar, and heave it in a mess of blood and ash onto Ryot’s wound, as those dark tendrils climb up my legs.
The darkness seizes us.
It rips us back, Vaeloria and me, in a violent lurch. My scream never makes it past my lips. There’s no air, no light. There’s only pressure, crushing and cold.
And then there’s nothing at all.
“They called us monsters because they couldn’t stomach what they’d done to us.”
Margin note from The Treatise on Tactical Collapse
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
I clawmy way out of the darkness, even as it clings to me. I heave and shove at it, but each time I manage to shake free of one piece, another wraps around me again until I’m tangled in it. It’s not ready to let me go.
Rest, it tells me.You must rest.
But there’s something urgent outside of the darkness. Something that compels me to fight. Finally, my eyes spring open and I gasp in a deep breath of fresh forest air. It triggers a coughing fit that rips me open. My chest heaves as spasms take hold, squeezing my ribs with such force that I’m left gasping. I vomit ash, sharp and metallic.
My eyes stream tears, trying to expel something that’s gritty and scratchy, coating the surface of my eyeballs and my eyelids. But the tears offer little relief; the burn seems to amplify the more they flow down. I squint, but the harsh ray of sunlight shining through the trees is a sharp jab, forcing my eyes closed again.
I clutch fingers into the dirt to steady myself, and a snout brushes into my hair.
Vaeloria. I heave out a sob, and run my hands over her, seeing with my fingers that she’s uninjured. But she, too, is covered in the gritty, abrasive powder. The shattered rock and glass buried in her coat scrapes against the skin on my palms.
“Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream,” I chant out through coughing attacks.
The babbling and gurgling of the river reaches my ears, and I stumble to my feet, pulling at Vaeloria. I find the water through red-rimmed eyes, then grasp a hand in her mane and lead her to the river’s edge. We lurch our way into the water until we’re completely submerged, and I sink below the surface, the fresh water a balm on aching, dry skin, on my poisoned eyes, in my burning mouth. The water around us goes cloudy and thick, as I work to scrub the ash from Vaeloria’s coat and her wings, running my fingers over her again and again until the water around us runs clear once more.
We both stay like that, completely submerged in the center of the river, for entire minutes at a time, forced to the surface only by a driving need for air. The water is the only thing that counteracts the agony, and so we float there in the deepest part of the River Eleris. Every creature—the fish, the frogs, the whispering insects that once danced along the surface—vanished from this part of the river when ash swirled into the water, thick and choking.
Through it all, I keep my eyes on Vaeloria’s. She’s not afraid. She’s in pain, too, but she’s calm and her calm lends me strength. Finally, the sharp edges of the pain start to dull; the heat of the pain gives way to a coolness that leaves my body tender but no longer searing.
Vaeloria swims for the river’s edge, and I follow. When she reaches the shallows, she snorts, blowing out a harsh spray of water and air. Her legs are spent, and she sinks back down onto the ground, her sides heaving as she takes big gulps of air.
I drag myself out of the river, arms and legs quivering as I crawl onto the bank. I heave again, but there’s no more sick left to come up. I collapse onto my side on the riverbank, Vaeloria beside me. I lay there like that, my mind thick and coated. I reach a hand out for Vaeloria—I need to be touching her—and my gaze is caught by my bloodstained fingers.
Despite the time we spent in the water, the underneath of my fingernails and my nail cuticles are caked in blood. There’s no actual blood on my pruny fingers, but they’re stained red, like they soaked in blood all through the night. Like they soaked in it fordays.
I let out one hysterical breath.
“Oh, sweet Thayana, it was real,” I whisper.
