32. Cinn
thirty-two
Cinn
I f Cinn was currently in the shadowrealm, it was no version he’d ever been to before.
This was… nothingness.
A soundless vacuum consisting only of unfathomable obsidian darkness that held him in a tight grip of paralysis. Any endeavour at movement was fruitless. Cinn attempted to force his mind to recall his music, any snatch of lyrics that would help to tie his floating consciousness back to reality, but none came. Even the sound of his own heartbeat was absent, leaving endless absolute silence.
Was he simply imagining the sensation of blinking? Was he presently staring at the back of his eyelids? Hard to say when his entire world was a blank canvas of blackness.
Time was an abstract concept here.
Hours, days, years could pass, could already have passed, and Cinn would be clueless, locked in this timeless cage of eternal limbo.
Cinn felt nothing. Nothing aside from longing. Not pain, not fear, not even curiosity, but longing.
He longed to hear the sound of his own breath, to feel the compression and expansion of his ribs as his lungs took in precious air.
He longed for his red city with its fractured moon, far preferable to this suffocating abyss of nothingness.
Longing , tinged with bitter regret.
He longed for the life he almost had, could have had .
He longed for the many people he didn’t get to say goodbye to. Tyler. All of his other London friends. Darcy and Elliot. Julien .
If this was it, if he was dead, he’d spent his last two weeks alive torturing himself and Julien for nothing.
Julien ? Cinn struggled to place the name. Distantly, he became aware that he was slipping away from himself. This should have panicked him, but the further he fell, the less he felt the sense of loss.
Fragmented memories danced at the edge of his consciousness, elusive and disjointed, teasing him with fleeting images that he couldn’t even say for sure were his own.
A burnt-orange setting sun melting into London’s horizon.
The stars dancing in a cloudless night sky, above a garden bench. A garden bench … a garden bench he could no longer remember the importance of.
The softness of olive-green cotton underneath his fingertips.
Two dimples, their quick flash throwing a blanket of bittersweetness over him.
Three of… something. Something good. Something whole. Three pillars, holding him up. Or was it four?
A fleeting feeling of warmth, of safety, of home.
And then, nothing.