Page 101 of Synodic

Rowen.

Of course I would conjure him here in my last moments.

“Keira,” he repeated with a choked sob, and if I wasn’t already broken, the sound would have surely cut me to the ground. His gentle hands roamed and checked my beaten body, but the contact was nothing more than a dull throb. I couldn’t really feel anything anymore. “What have they done to you?” he asked, sickened and repulsed.

Rowen slowly rolled me into his arms and carefully lifted my upper body until the side of my head rested against his strong chest. I could hear his heartbeat through his shirt, and despite the sped-up hammering, it was powerful, comforting, and steadying, and I latched onto its thumping.

This was the sound I chose to fade away into.

I must have blacked out for a moment because I was abruptly shaken awake. “Don’t you dare close your eyes again, Keira. Look at me!” he demanded.

I opened them wearily, wanting to obey, but my ability to focus had gone. I wished I could see him clearly, but once again, he had been reduced to a foggy image.

His hand looped around to the back of my head, searching through my knotted hair until his fingertips gently examined the painful protrusion at the back of my skull.

I winced.

Why was I imagining Rowen only to have him poke and prod at my every injury? I didn’t want to waste what little time I had left focusing on all that hurt.

Needing to feel one last good thing, I tried to reach for him, to caress his face and run my fingers through the dark scruff on his jaw, but my limp arm hung pathetically by my side, refusing to comply.

I whimpered in frustration. You’d think in a hallucination things would go a little more my way.

“Don’t try to move,” he said, his voice wracked with anguish. “I’m so sorry, this is all my fault.”

I struggled to speak, to tell him it was alright, that it wasn’t his fault—but my battered body wasn’t executing any of my commands.

Out of my fuzzy periphery, I saw he was holding something glowing in his hand, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was. My vision was narrowing.

I could sense Rowen fussing over my leg with it, but I felt nothing. “Your noxlily bloomed, Keira. It was Takoda’s idea to heal you with your own light. Do you hear me? We are going to walk out of here together.”

I wanted to ask him how he knew where to find me, but my eyes felt as heavy as velvet stage curtains. To let the grand drapes shut even for a little while would feel so nice, so welcoming.

“Stay with me,” Rowen pleaded with a desperate fury, “stay with me, Keira. If you fall asleep now, you will slip away from me forever, and I’m not going to let that happen. Do you understand me? You aren’t leaving me.”

I ignored him and closed my eyes soundly, searching for the soothing beat of his heart. It was better than listening to his wracked voice that sounded as if his very soul was being ripped from his body.

“You have accepted this as peace and I cannot allow it,” he said, sweeping my matted hair off to the side. “I’m going to heal your head injury next. It will cause the pain in the rest of your body to worsen, and for that I am sorry, but I need you to feel. To fight.”

More pain? How was that possible?

I wanted to tell him that I was uninterested in this plan of his, that I’d rather sleep, but my lids and mouth wouldn’t open.

“I need you to stay with me. I should have told you from the first moment you came out of the darkness that I love you. I love you, Keira.” The voice sounded just like Rowen’s, though I knew he wasn’t really here saying the words I’d always hoped to hear. But I smiled anyway.

My head lolled to the side and my entire body went limp in Rowen’s arms. I had the vague feeling that he was violently shaking me, demanding I open my eyes for him.

I would love nothing more than to make Rowen happy and do as he ordered, but the silence had claimed me now.

Suddenly, with a whip of lightning, two things happened simultaneously. One: my mind rushed to the surface, swimming into clarity as the deathly pall around my consciousness cleared.

And two: pain.

Vicious, blinding pain like an archipelago of volcanoes erupting over my entire body, savagely detonating all at once.

My eyes shot open as my whole body bucked and arched off the filthy ground. I didn’t want this white-hot searing pain, not when I had just accepted the black stillness. I was furious at Rowen for making me feel this. It was like receiving every injury all over again.

My head wound had been dulling the pain, nearly all of it, and now I was fully aware of every damaged and broken piece of me.

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