Chapter 9 #2
"Ruairí closed his eyes, his hands shoved deep into his pockets as he let out a long, ragged breath.
"He used to steal the apples from our orchard before he could Shift more than his hands.
The crazy boy thought he was being so stealthy, completely oblivious to the fact that we were watching him from the porch and cheering him on. "
The brief stories floated over the clearing like incense, bringing tiny, watery smiles and small, silent tears to the faces of the Universe’s Chosen Warriors.
Sydney listened to it all, her white-knuckle grip on Garrett’s hand never wavering.
Through the heavy, dark fog of the silver poisoning, she felt the Mating Bond absorb the weight of their words.
Garrett wasn't just a missing piece of her own soul.
He wasn't just a puzzle to be solved or a victim to be rescued from The Abyss.
He was their Family. He was their brother, their teacher, their childhood friend, and their anchor.
He was woven into the very fabric of their history, and as the Dragon Guardsmen stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the fading Texas sun, they weren't just watching a Healing Ritual.
They were fighting for a piece of themselves.
The transfer to the house took less than five minutes. Stabilizing Garrett took the next four hours. The air inside the room was thick with the crisp scent of ozone, Magic, and the heavy, ancient presence of the First Elder working from the Realm of the Ancients.
At the center of the bed, Garrett lay terrifyingly still. The immediate, toxic threat of the silver poisoning had been neutralized, but his eyes remained closed.
Inside Sydney’s mind, the spiritual plane was a crowded, hyper-focused war room. Kara and Aodhan worked in perfect, seamless tandem, their powerful consciousnesses overlaying Ginnie’s intricate spells to map the wreckage of Garrett’s internal landscape.
Ginnie finally stepped back from the bedside, wiping a layer of cold sweat from her forehead with the back of her sleeve. Her sharp Necromancer eyes were dark with exhaustion, but her professional focus was unwavering as she looked across the mattress at Sydney.
"I’ve managed to repair the primary neural pathways," Ginnie began, her voice tight but steady. "We’ve reconnected the bridge between his human cells and his Dragon. Garrett survived The Abyss, Sydney. But survival came at a catastrophic price."
Sydney didn't let go of his hand. "Why isn't he waking up, Ginnie? The poison is gone. His heart is stable."
"Because his system is entirely overloaded," Ginnie explained, gesturing to a glowing, faint schematic floating in the air above his chest. "Leviathan’s relentless torture didn't just break his body.
It systematically and demonically targeted his spirit.
To keep the anchor from failing, Aodhan had to pull every drop of their shared Power inward.
Their White Dragonfire didn't just fade.
It nearly burned itself out completely. His central nervous system is entirely fried from the raw kinetic feedback of rewriting that seal. "
Deep inside Sydney’s mind, Kara let out a soft, unusually somber rumble of agreement. “The girl speaks the truth, my special girl. His soul... it needs rest. Real rest.”
"He and Aodhan need to enter the Healing Sleep of Dragonkin," Ginnie said softly, placing a comforting hand on Sydney’s trembling shoulder. "The oldest healing known to Dragonkin and most effective. It’s the hibernation of the Dragon Kings. It isn’t because he’s dying anymore, Syd.
It's exactly the opposite. That deep, comatose dormancy is the only way a Dragon soul can regenerate after experiencing catastrophic, primordial trauma. "
The word sleep felt like a physical blow to Sydney's chest, cracking her hard-won composure. She looked down at Garrett’s pale, handsome face, his dark curls spilling across the white pillows. He had just remembered her shoes. He had just looked at her as a partner. She had just gotten him back.
Sydney swallowed the lump in her throat, her blue eyes snapping up to meet Ginnie’s. "How long?"
Silence stretched across the room, heavy and suffocating. Carrick stood by the window, his jaw tight, while the other Guardsmen in the room went completely still.
Ginnie looked down, unable to hold her gaze. "Nobody knows, Syd. With trauma this deep... it could be days. It could be weeks. It could be months. It’s entirely up to Aodhan and Garrett’s will to return."
The heavy oak door clicked shut, the soft footsteps of Dragon Guardsmen finally fading down the long corridor. One by one, they had retreated, leaving the suite entirely silent save for the rhythmic, steady whisper of Garrett’s breathing.
Sydney sat in the plush armchair tucked tight against the mattress. The glowing diagnostic spells had dimmed to a faint, soothing nightlight. She didn't let go of his hand. His palm was finally losing its terrifying, icy chill, warming slightly under the ambient heat of the room.
Now, without Carrick barking orders, without a Demon Lord throwing Dark Magic around like confetti, and no Dragons debating primeval law, Sydney talked.
She really talked. For weeks, she had been the strong one, the calculating savior, the Special One.
But in this instance, she was just a woman sitting by the bed of the man who held her soul.
“You are an unqualified idiot, you know that?” she whispered into the quiet room, a watery smile breaking through her exhaustion.
There was no response. No sarcastic rumble from Aodhan, no raspy comeback from the bed. Just Garrett’s chest lifting in a slow, deep hibernation rhythm.
“I was so angry at you,” Sydney murmured, her thumb gently tracing the faint, clean bandages wrapping his bruised wrist. “So incredibly terrified. Do you have any idea what it felt like when you vanished? I looked everywhere, Garrett. Kara and I pushed our Magic until it practically bled. We went straight into the throat of The Abyss for you, and if I had to do it all over again tomorrow, I wouldn’t hesitate for a single second. ”
She leaned forward, resting her forehead against their joined hands, letting her tears finally spill over, soaking into the white sheets.
“You don’t have to remember me today,” she rasp-whispered, her voice cracking under the weight of her broken heart.
“I know your brain is tired. I know Leviathan tore everything apart inside your head.” She paused, dragging a shaky breath into her lungs, and lifted her head to look at his resting face. “But tomorrow would be nice.”
She managed a tiny, breathless laugh, shaking her head as she brushed a rogue blond curl off her shoulder. “Next week is acceptable, too. I can work with next week.”
The humor faded, leaving only the pure, unyielding truth of the Mating Bond humming between them. She reached up with her free hand, gently brushing a dark, clean curl away from his forehead, memorizing the peaceful slope of his jaw.
“I’ll wait,” Sydney whispered into the dark. “No matter how long it takes. I’ll be right here.”
Garrett floated in a vast, bottomless expanse of pure tar.
The Healing Sleep didn’t feel like a bed or a room.
It felt like a silent, weightless suspension beneath the surface of a deep, frozen ocean.
There was no pain. The agonizing bite of the iron and silver chains was gone.
The corrosive burn of the silver residue was neutralized.
His fractured nervous system was perfectly quiet, wrapped in the protective white-and-silver cocoon of Aodhan’s dormant energy.
He wasn't awake. He couldn’t move, and he couldn’t think in structured sentences. He was simply a consciousness resting in the dark, waiting for his soul to remember how to breathe.
Then, breaking through the utter silence of the Void, a sound rippled across the water.
“You are a total idiot, you know that?”
It was a voice. It wasn't visual, and it didn't come with a face, but the frequency of the sound resonated straight through the depths of his soul.
Garrett didn't try to struggle upward toward the surface. He listened, letting the sound anchor him. With every syllable that drifted down into the dark, a tiny, brilliant spark of gold light ignited in the space around him.
“I was so angry at you…”
Another spark flared to life.
“So incredibly terrified…”
More lights bloomed in the dark, multiplying with every phrase she spoke, forming a fragile, glowing constellation in the abyss of his mind. The words were a lifeline. Each one was a microscopic stitch repairing a torn neural pathway, a gentle hand guiding his mind back to health.
“You don’t have to remember me today… but tomorrow would be nice.”
It wasn't enough power to wake him. The catastrophic trauma required weeks of profound, uninterrupted hibernation to fully heal. But the Light was enough to start the slow, steady process of rebuilding the foundation. It gave his spirit a direction to grow toward.
As the voice grew quieter, fading into a comforting, steady hum that promised she would wait, the scattered sparks of gold light suddenly shifted. They swirled together, condensing down into a single, crystal-clear, incredibly stubborn image floating right at the center of his sleeping mind.
A pair of light blue Converse tennis shoes.