Chapter 52 Anastasius
Pain consumed my body. Fire. Everything burned, blazed. Used to numbness, I couldn’t bear it. I screamed in protest, my eyes flying wide open. My chest heaved, each breath agony, like my lungs were made of shattered glass. Hands held me down and voices murmured reassurances.
“What is happening to him?!” Claeg demanded, making my eyes focus on him. My Chosen looked at me with pain and terror in his eyes. I tried to reassure him that I was alright, but when I opened my mouth, my throat only let out anguish. “Stop this!” Claeg shouted at someone. My head turned to follow his gaze.
A young woman loomed over me. I gasped at the face I had come to consider a friend. I thought I would never see her again. The woman I had only come to know as Hen. Her pale hair matched Claeg’s, and she wore an array of blades. More than she had ever been awarded in De Vita. They suited her. The weapons looked as much a part of her as an arm or an eye.
Hen frowned, her lip caught between her teeth as she concentrated. She didn’t even pause her mantra, nor the movements of her hardened fingers. Her hands danced before her. The Circulus had found my friend. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed. At least Hen looked well cared for. The gauntness in her sharp cheeks and dark circles around her green eyes were gone. She ignored Claeg, continuing her work. She was healing me, but not just of my most recent wounds. It shouldn’t have been possible. Father had said my curse was permanent and progressive and yet . . . I felt pain. My body remembered it like an old friend. Embraced it with screams of delighted horror that tore through the numbness within me.
“Clotho, contain him.” Hen jerked her head at the woman behind her. Her cadence was rough, skewed, even, but surprisingly easy to understand her words. Well, the non-magical ones she spoke in the common tongue. That much was a huge improvement compared to our last meeting, when I had freed her from my father’s clutches.
My eyes drooped, my body suddenly exhausted. I dropped back down, slamming onto a hard surface. The movement sent shooting pain throughout my body, and I cried out. It hurt, yet I cherished the shooting spikes clawing through my body.
“I said stop!” Claeg shrieked. I heard a scuffle, but my eyes were too heavy to see what was going on. Blackness overtook me even though I begged to stay.