Chapter 28 DRAVOK
There was a place where time did not behave. I was there. Not asleep. Not awake. Not unconscious in any way that mortals would have recognized. It was something deeper, an enforced stillness imposed from the outside, layered over a mind that refused to rest.
I could feel the restraints, though there were none on my body. Fields. Dampeners. Thought-suppression lattices humming at frequencies meant to confuse, to dull, to contain. They pressed against me like fog, blurring the edges of my awareness without extinguishing it.
They had learned something, at least. But they had not silenced me. Not fully. I was still here, still aware. Tentatively, I stretched out my mind to grasp what was around me, but I couldn't sense even the faintest trace of their presence. Not yet.
Something moved in the dark behind my eyes. Not a presence—not anymore. Not separate. It had folded inward, coiled around the fractures it had widened, settling into me like an echo that refused to fade.
Fight, it urged.
Fight what?
The question made me angry.
Rage flared, hot and sudden, burning through the fog, lighting up memories in jagged flashes: stone shattering beneath my hands, bodies breaking, the taste of power flooding my veins. The certainty of purpose. The relief of destruction.
I had been right then.
Hadn't I?
I strained against the dampeners, allowing my fury to spiral outward, testing the edges of my confinement. The fields held. They always did at first.
I reached for the last thing I remembered destroying: her.
The thought surfaced, sharp and instinctive, followed by a surge of satisfaction that curdled almost immediately into confusion. Had I killed her? The image would not settle.
Sometimes I saw her clearly, small, breakable, eyes wide with something that twisted painfully in my chest. Other times, she was nothing more than a shape, a concept: the interference. The flaw. The thing that had to be eliminated so that the noise would stop.
And sometimes—sometimes I heard her voice. Not spoken aloud. Inside me.
Dravok.
The sound cut through the rage like a blade through silk.
I froze.
The fury faltered, slipped sideways into something dangerously close to panic. I grasped for the memory, for the certainty that she was gone, that I had finished what I started—but the voice came again, softer this time.
Stay.
The word made no sense.
I snarled and tried to push it away, but the dampeners distorted the effort, scattering my thoughts instead of focusing them. Images bled together. The past folded over itself. Had she said my name like that? Had there been warmth in it? Why did the sound of it hurt?
The echo inside me shifted, sensing the disruption. She is not gone, it whispered, not in words, but in alignment. In logic, that felt inevitable. She survived. She persists. She destabilizes.
Anger surged again, hotter this time, sharpened by humiliation.
I would wake. The decision came with grim clarity.
I would wake. Tear through the restraints.
Finish what had been interrupted. The thought brought a flicker of peace.
But then something strange happened. The peace did not come from the certainty of violence.
It came from elsewhere.
A stillness opened inside me, small and fragile, like a pocket of calm I had not noticed before. It did not demand anything. It did not urge or press. It simply… was.
The sensation startled me more than the rage ever had. I reached for it instinctively, and in doing so, brushed against something that felt like memory but refused to resolve into images.
Warmth.
Balance.
The sense of not being alone in my own mind. The echo recoiled. That was weakness, it warned. That was why I fractured.
But the feeling lingered, stubborn and gentle, refusing to be erased. I frowned, an expression that felt unfamiliar in this place of extremes. There was a word for it. I knew there was.
It hovered just beyond reach, resting on the tip of my consciousness like a sound I almost remembered how to make. Not peace. Not surrender. Something quieter. Something that did not require me to fight at all. The effort of reaching for the word exhausted me.
I was so tired.
The realization sank into my bones. Tired in a way that went beyond physical strain, tired of holding everything back, of maintaining control through force alone. Tired of being the last wall standing against collapse. Tired of being alone. The fury flared again in response, violent and indignant.
Sleep, the echo urged. Let go. Let me carry it.
That was new.
Suspicion cut through the haze. Sleep had never been an option. Sleep meant vulnerability. Sleep meant… her voice came again, clearer this time. You don't have to do this alone.
The words arrived not as sound, but as understanding.
As if they had always been there, waiting for me to notice.
My breath caught. Who are you? The question was not directed at the echo.
It was not even directed at the voice. It was directed inward, toward the part of me that remembered gold light instead of red and black.
Toward the memory of calm that had once settled over me without force.
The echo hissed, its coherence fraying at the edges. She was trying to change you. The accusation rang hollow. Change.
The word no longer felt like an insult. I turned inward, away from the urge to wake, to kill, to end.
Away from the certainty of destruction. The dampeners hummed, steady and patient.
Somewhere beyond them, I sensed movement.
Time resuming its proper shape. Decisions being made.
Threaded through it all, faint but persistent, was that voice.
Not pleading.
Not commanding.
Waiting.
The strange calm spread, fragile but real, wrapped around the fury without extinguishing it.
For the first time since arriving on Cronack, the anger did not feel like the only thing holding me together.
I let myself rest against it. Just for a moment.
The echo retreated, unsettled. In the quiet that followed, the almost-word brushed my consciousness once more—closer now, clearer.
Balance.
I did not know how I knew.
Only that if I could hold on to that feeling—if I could remember the sound of her voice, the way it anchored me—I might wake for a different reason. And when I did, I would know what to fight.