Page 4 of Veinblood
I won't surrender to the emptiness, won't let myself be crushed down into nothing. I've survived too much to give up now.
Sounds pierce the blackness. Noises that belong to no place in Meridian. Voices whisper at the edges of my awareness, their cadence strange, their tone all wrong.
Where did the explosion send me?
Am I dead? In purgatory?
I strain to hear more, trying to make sense of the sounds. There’s rhythm, tones and pitches I’ve never heard in Meridian. Then voices slowly begin to separate from the noise, low and urgent.
They don’t sound like Authority soldiers. They don’t belong to Mira or Sacha, or the others who came to Thornspire with us.
These voices are different, and the wrongness of it sends cold dread spreading through me.
My mind continues to spin, throwing out questions I have no answers to.
What happened to the Veinwardens preparing to defend Stonehaven? To Varam, and the fighters who risked everything to free Sacha? What about Lisandra, locked away beneath Stonehaven, waiting for her execution?
The faces of everyone I’ve come to know flash through my mind. People who welcomed me, fought beside me, believed that shadow and storm together might turn the tide against the Authority.
They’ve become my family in ways I never thought possible. Among them, I found purpose beyond survival. I uncovered strength, determination, compassion, and a capacity for violence I never thought myself capable of. All things I never thought possible in the comfortable, boring predictability of my life in Chicago.
Chicago. The place feels like a dream now. A fiction I told myself about who I was. That woman, with her job and quiet routines, seems as foreign to me as the woman in the visions.
She never had to make life-or-death decisions. She never had to choose between safety and doing what was right. She never had to look into the face of evil and decide whether she had the strength to fight it.
She was weak. Comfortable in her weakness. Content to let other people make the hard choices while she lived her small, safe,boringlife.
I don’t want to be her anymore. Whatever else happens, whatever world I’m in now, I can’t go back to being that person. I won’t.
More memories flood through me.
The tower where I saw Sacha for the first time. The desert and its scorching heat that burned my lungs with every breath. Ravencross, caught between the Authority’s iron grip and the quiet resistance hidden beneath it. Stonehaven and its underground chambers carved deep into the mountain. River Crossing, where Sacha’s shadows were ripped from him, and my own power rose in a storm I couldn’t stop.
Each place, each moment, has carved itself into me. I carry them now. They’re more than just memories, the pieces of what I have become.
And then more intimate memories rise.
Sacha’s hand finding mine in the dark. The way his fingers curled around mine. His lips against my skin. The way shadow and silver light twined together.
The first time we kissed, in the depths of Stonehaven, when I touched his raven and our essences merged for the first time. The way he looked at me afterward, like he was seeing something in me I didn’t know was there.
The night before we left for Thornspire, when we lay together in his bed. The warmth of his body against mine. The steady rhythm of his breathing. The way his shadows curled protectively around us both, as though they could shield us from what was coming.
I knew then that I loved him.
The memories hold for a second before a new sensation cuts through them. Wet cold against my back and legs. It sinks into my clothes, clinging to my skin, chasing the warmth away.
My body feels wrong. Heavy in ways that don’t make sense. My limbs won’t answer me. Even breathing feels like effort.
Whatever I’m lying on is freezing, hard and unforgiving beneath me.
I need to see. I need to move. I need to find my way back to Sacha, back to Thornspire. We don’t have time for failure. Too many are depending on us. Waiting for answers, for hope, forsome kind of future beyond this fight. Sacha could be anywhere. He could be captured. Or he could be holding his own against Sereven while I float here in this …nothing.
Everything we’ve done, everything we’ve risked to get this far, could fall apart if I don’t make it back.
I fight my way through the darkness, and slowly,so slowly, light begins to form ahead of me. A tiny pinprick at first, but it grows larger as I push toward it. The blackness breaks apart, light stabbing through the gaps in blinding beams. My eyes feel like they’ve been sealed shut. Each attempt to open them sends spikes of pain through my head, but I keep trying.
My body won’t respond to my brain’s commands to move, but I refuse to surrender. I refuse to sink into this emptiness and never return.
