CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
VAYEN
Istumbled into the wood, my uncontrolled breathing and galloping heartbeat only furthering my descent into madness.
I pressed off each tree as I passed by, the bark’s roughness against the pads of my fingers devoid of its usual steadying comfort.
The darkness before me was interrupted by flashes of grey.
One moment I could see, and the next I couldn’t.
Vision returned.
Vision revoked.
Each shift of my gaze was a stutter, a jump, incapable of fluidity. Whether bathed in darkness or bathed in a grey-green hue, I was no longer a part of this forest. I existed outside if it.
Outside of myself.
My body was confused. I could feel that primal urge settling into my chest, deep and heavy and overwhelming with its need to phase.
To lose myself in the transformation that I so desperately craved.
But it was a forgotten word on the edge of my mind whose concept could be remembered but not fully grasped. My body wanted what it could not have.
Don’t stop.
Keep moving.
I gasped for the freezing night air, the deepest parts of my lungs untouched by panicked, shallow breathing. I could still feel in my chest and face where Berig’s blows had landed.
Usually, it wouldn’t have happened like that.
But she had been there, hidden behind a gossamer veil. As if that ridiculous Lunamorian cloak could have kept me from sensing her. From scenting her. From knowing her.
I would always know her.
And I could never.
If she had stayed, and Gavner sensed the beginnings of my phase, he would have killed every last one of us.
I hesitated there, the rage growing within my body reaching its limits. Another flash. Violently red. Consuming the rational parts of my mind. The parts I so desperately wanted to relinquish.
I collapsed to the forest floor as wave after wave of pure fury coursed through me.
Blood on my hands.
Berig’s blood.
This was too much. I thought the visions would help us, but they’d only brought more questions. More uncertainty. More danger.
And her.
I raised my face to the sky, Naeno’s moonlight sifting through the tree cover to melt over my skin, as if it fucking mattered.
The scream that escaped me was not my own. I could never make a noise like that. Such animalistic rage could not belong to me.
Not anymore.
“Why?” I wailed into the night, ugly sobs squeezing and pushing my insides. With a jagged inhale, I screamed with my whole body, “Why are you doing this? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”
A chorus of unintelligible whispers shocked my system. I whipped my head in their direction, chest rising and falling with the moment’s intensity. But there was only darkness beyond the trees.
Slowly, I drew myself up, eyes darting around the wood in search of where the voices had come from. When their prickling echo returned, my heightened senses pulled me forward. I took off running, chasing after the barely-there whispers that beckoned me deeper into the forest.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d run for, or when the whispers had subsided. But when I stumbled upon a lonesome well, I knew where I had been led.
I gripped the dilapidated brick to remain upright.
Those whispers.
The faceless woman?
She had never come to me in my waking hours, and now that she had, she brought me here.
To him.
His voice cut through the chilly night air, calling to me from his kitchen window with a hiccup, as though he had been waiting for me all along:
“Took you long enough. Get—hic!—in here before you frighten the bittlebugs.”