Chapter 18
Seph
I woke up coughing on the rocks by the river.
Water burned in my lungs. My whole body shook as I dragged in air that felt too thin, too sharp.
I didn’t remember hitting the water. Only the cold. The force of it swallowing me whole.
It had dragged me under, spun me, stolen every sense of up or down. I’d felt nothing but blind panic.
There was no air. No light. Just the crushing weight of the current.
Somehow — luck, instinct, desperation — my hand had snagged on a branch. I clung to it while the river tried to rip me free, battered and dragged downstream until the current finally spat me out.
Now I lay on the riverbank, soaked, shivering, rocks biting into my palms.
The night was silent.
No Sy. No city. No idea which direction led back to the compound.
Only the sound of the river moving past me like nothing had happened.
I pushed myself upright, fingers slipping on wet stone. My gloves had been ripped off in the current.
“Sy!” I called into the dark, my voice shaking in the cold.
The trees gave me nothing back.
I took a step toward the woods and pain flared through me so hard my vision pulsed white. My whole body felt like I’d been thrown into a meat grinder and stitched back together wrong.
I lifted a hand to my head.
It came away slick.
Blood.
“Shit,” I breathed.
The cut throbbed deep and heavy, like something had cracked open beneath it. My balance tilted sideways for a second before the world steadied again.
Bad. That’s bad.
I turned slowly, looking both ways along the river.
Water. Endless water. Black and rushing.
The Aurelion ran clear across Velithra.
Which meant I could be anywhere.
I stumbled forward through the trees, fingers hooking into branches to keep myself upright.
Each step made the world tilt harder.
A light breeze brushed across my face.
Ash.
“Tell him where I am,” I whispered hoarsely. “Please.”
The air curled once against my cheek — almost playful — then slipped away into the night.
I didn’t have air magic.
I just had hope.
I pushed on, pulling my body through the woods on sheer will alone.
After a long time, the forest had thinned without me noticing. One step hit something hard and loose beneath my boots.
Gravel.
I looked down.
A road.
Relief flared — quick and bright — then faded just as fast.
Because there were no streetlights, just endless black snaking both directions.
I listened for headlights. For engines. For anything.
There was only the river behind me, moving steadily through the night, and the high ringing that had taken up residence inside my skull.
At this hour, the world felt emptied out.
And I was standing in the open.
Cold seeped through my clothes and into my skin, settling deep enough that I couldn’t tell whether I was shivering from the air or from whatever my body had already endured.
My legs trembled in uneven waves, muscles misfiring, each step demanding more than I had left to give.
The edges of the road softened when I looked at them too long, as though the dark were slowly reclaiming what little structure remained.
I stepped onto it anyway.
The gravel shifted beneath me. My balance wavered, and the trees along the verge seemed to sway in slow, unnatural arcs.
Perhaps they were moving.
Perhaps I was.
So, I walked.
I don’t remember deciding to. My body simply kept moving, one step folding into the next, until the trembling in my legs turned violent and my knees gave way beneath me.
There was no time to catch myself.
Gravel tore into my palms. The impact burst white across my vision, a flash that swallowed the road and the trees and left only ringing silence in its wake. For a moment I thought I had gone blind.
Then the world returned at an angle.
Frozen stones pressed into my cheek, their edges sharp enough that I could trace their shape through my skin, grounding and distant at the same time, as though the sensation belonged to someone else and not entirely to me.
The sky above me stretched wide and merciless, a black expanse without edges, and it felt too large to belong to the same world as me — too vast for something so small and shaking to exist beneath it without simply being swallowed whole.
My fingers twitched against the gravel, scraping uselessly.
I couldn’t feel them anymore. The cold had moved inward, past skin and muscle, settling somewhere deeper, somewhere that made it difficult to tell where my body ended and the night began.
A strange, detached thought drifted through me, almost curious in its calm.
I wondered, vaguely, if this was how people disappeared.
Just… quiet. Alone. Unseen.
Somewhere in the dark an owl called, the sound low and solitary, as though the world had narrowed to that single note and the faint pulse in my ears.
Then, slowly, light began to bloom at the far edge of my vision.
It was faint at first, wavering, so distant that I thought it might be something my mind had invented to fill the dark. But it grew stronger, cutting pale lines across the road, and the low hum of an engine reached me a second later, real and steady and close enough to matter.
Tires slowed. Gravel shifted.
A car door opened, and footsteps approached without hesitation.
A shadow fell across me, blotting out a portion of the sky.
“…Hey. Hey — can you hear me?”
The voice was low. Calm. Not panicked.
Not afraid.
Warm hands turned me gently onto my back.
And for the first time since the fall…
I felt safe.
Then the dark took me.