Chapter 14 – Azaria
AZARIA
Iwoke to quiet. Not the wrong kind. Not the hollow, swallowing nothingness of the Black Cell. This quiet had edges. Weight. I could hear my own breathing—slow, rough, the faint rasp of cloth when my chest rose. That meant I was somewhere real.
Light pressed against my eyelids. Dim, but it still stung. I kept them shut, grinding my teeth, and waited for the burn to ease. It didn’t, not fully. I opened them anyway, and the ceiling swam into focus through watering eyes.
Pale stone. Runes etched shallow along the beams, faintly lit, steady and contained. Not a cell. Not the black.
A room.
I lay still, cataloguing what hurt. Head—a dull, splitting ache behind my eyes that sharpened every time the light caught wrong. My throat was dry and my tongue was thick. My hands were clenched so tight that my knuckles ached.
The band. My silver ring twisted hard into my finger, skin raw and stinging where I’d worried it for days. I tried to loosen my grip. My fingers wouldn’t cooperate at first, stiff and clumsy, like they’d forgotten how to obey.
Rage.
It was the only thing that felt solid.
I forced my gaze lower. A proper bed, narrow but clean.
The sheets were tucked tight and even that felt like too much against my skin—too smooth, too present after days of nothing but cold rock.
A runestone sat beneath the pillow near my head, warmth humming against my temple.
The air smelled of crushed herbs and clean water, and the smell was so sharp it made my stomach twist.
Healer’s wing.
Memory tried to surface and slid away again, leaving nothing but heat behind my ribs.
Rage.
A pulse buzzed against my wrist. I flinched hard, breath hitching, my whole body jerking sideways before I could stop it. My hand clamped over the sensation, and I held there through clenched teeth. The pulse repeated. Gentle. Rhythmic. Not painful.
Once. Twice.
I stared down at the bracelet encircling my wrist. Silver worked, plain. Runes etched small and precise along the inside band. Time marker.
I counted three breaths, shallow and uneven, until the buzzing stopped and my pulse settled back to something that didn’t feel like it was trying to crack my ribs from the inside. My hands shook when I lowered them. I curled my fingers into the mattress, grounding myself in the rough weave.
Stone beneath. Fabric beneath. Air moving in and out. Still here.
Rage.
Footsteps. Soft and measured. I turned my head too fast, and pain lanced immediately behind my eyes. I sucked in a breath through clenched teeth and held still as my vision blurred.
“Easy.”
Myrin’s voice. Even at that volume it landed too loudly, scraping against the inside of my skull.
I winced. She came into view slowly, as if she’d planned every step not to startle me.
She wore pale robes with her hair braided back tightly, carrying a cup and a small tray.
When she set the tray on the table beside the bed, the soft clink of ceramic on wood made me flinch again.
I hated that. Hated the flinching, hated that a sound that small could make my body react like a threat was coming.
“You’re awake,” she stated.
“Apparently.”
My voice sounded wrong. Flat. Scraped raw. Like someone had taken sandpaper to the inside of my throat. She nodded, as if that answered everything. She didn’t touch me. Smart.
“How long?” I asked.
“Part of the day,” she said. “Drink.”
I eyed the cup. Clear liquid, faintly blue at the edges.
Enchanted water. Rehydration tonic. I reached for it, and my hand shook so badly I nearly knocked it off the table.
I got both hands around it, gripping too tight, and brought it to my lips.
Some of it slopped over the rim and ran down my wrist. I drank in careful gulps.
Cool slid down my throat, easing the burn.
But the act of holding the cup, of coordinating swallow and breath and grip—it took more concentration than it should have.
Everything took more than it should have.
Rage receded half a step. Not gone. Never gone. But quieter.
Myrin watched my hands. The tremor. The band twisting again. She reached up and adjusted one rune above my head. I tensed at the movement, shoulders pulling tight before I could stop them. The light softened and dimmed further.
“Better?” she asked.
“Yes.”
It was. I hated that too—hated needing dim light and runestones and enchanted water to function. Hated that six days in the dark had turned me into someone who flinched at a healer adjusting a rune.
She took the empty cup from me, without touching me, and passed me a square of rough cloth next. “Describe it.”
“Scratchy,” I muttered. The texture grated against my fingertips, too sharp, as if my nerve endings had been stripped raw and every sensation was arriving at twice its actual intensity.
A smooth glass vial. “Cold. Smooth.”
Then a sliver of wood. “Warm.”
“Good.”
The word hit wrong. Rage flared, a spike of heat behind my sternum. Good for what? For being functional enough to identify a piece of wood? For managing to hold a cup without dropping it?
“Don’t patronize me,” I said, and the edge in my voice surprised us both.
Myrin didn’t react. Didn’t flinch, didn’t stiffen, didn’t do any of the things that would have made me feel guilty about snapping. She looked at me with steady, assessing eyes.
“It’s a baseline check,” she said evenly. “Your sensory processing was severely disrupted. I need to know what’s recalibrating and what isn’t.”
I clenched my jaw. She was right, and knowing she was right made me angrier. “Fine.”
She worked in silence after that. Adjusted the runes on my wrist bracelet, murmuring a stabilizing enchantment under her breath.
Warmth spread slow and controlled through my chest, smoothing the jagged edge of my pulse.
I didn’t relax. I didn’t let it take too much.
Relaxing meant letting go, and I wasn’t ready to let go of anything.
Rage.
A plate appeared beside the bed: bread, broth, plain. “No visitors,” Myrin said. “Strict protocols for sensory deprivation recovery.”
“Good.” I didn’t want anyone seeing me like this. Shaking hands, flinching at sounds, unable to hold a cup steady. The squad didn’t need to see their captain reduced to a woman who couldn’t tell a rune change from a threat.
“You don’t remember last night,” she said.
“No.”
I remembered twisting my band, again and again. Split skin. Pain grounding me. Rage filling the gaps where thought should have been. That was it.
“That’s normal,” she said. “Your mind protected itself.”
“By shredding itself,” I replied.
Her mouth twitched. “By surviving.”
I scoffed and reached for the spoon. My fingers fumbled it twice before I got a proper grip.
The broth tasted like almost nothing—my sense of taste was dulled and flat, everything registering at a distance—but I ate anyway.
Mechanical. Slow. Each spoonful required the kind of focus that should have been embarrassing.
It made me furious. All of it. The shaking hands and the dull food and the too-loud silence, and the way my body kept betraying me, flinching at nothing, tensing at shadows, treating safety like another kind of threat.
The bracelet pulsed again.
One hour.
I put the spoon down carefully, because if I set it down the way I wanted to—hard, with force, a loud crack against the tray—Myrin would note it and add it to whatever clinical profile she was building.
I leaned back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The runes held. My hands shook less than before. Marginally. Rage settled deeper. No longer clawing at the surface, no longer spiking at every small indignity. It sank into the spaces behind my ribs and waited there, patient and hot.
Good.
I would need it later.