\\ DUSK\\ Fantasy AU \ ATEEZ Fanfic

// Chapter 22 \\

Should I have told this immediately? I should've. That figure was the weapon the Takers' had used against us time and time again. It was too important to not say a word. Too many things had just happened— I can agree with that— but this was a mystery that now seemed much more deadly than previously perceived. I was going to tell someone.

I was going to tell Leeyon, Ray of Eastern Court, after her human form made a swift fluid swim to the docking tower where I was. I was about to utter the words when she pried the seal open to the exit of the merger that had left with San and his new accomplice.

But she'd stopped my words before my lips could part with them, hastened to tell me that the three levels of the palace below had been completely flooded from her view outside of the palace. My thoughts of the information I held vanished as I immediately questioned of Hongjoong and Yeosang.

She didn't know.

My heart sank as the worst thoughts came to me, as my recovering form shook while Leeyon scanned me for injuries. She took note of a very evident black vein that spiked out on indented skin from the leftmost silver scab of where a wing would take form. I seemed to feel the pulse of pain from it as an evident reminder of the black arrow that had struck my left wing from that figure— the weapon.

I, once more, was going to tell Leeyon of this, but that was when a guard and healer had called to us, carrying an all too familiar figure with them and these thoughts of the figure vanished once again as I took in the sight of who.

Hongjoong's eyes had lost their fighting fire since I last saw him. They were now haunted and dull as if he were a dead man. He wasn't, but he acted as if he was frozen and limp being carried by the guard and healer, gazing down to his wrist where severed flesh was wrapped up in stained bandage— where a hand had once been. How lost his eyes were as he looked to where a part of him had once been that he lost.

I didn't say anything, unsure as Leeyon got up and ran over to him. It was a blur as I watched my friend with an escalating heart beat at only knowing a fraction of what he was probably feeling. The blackness from my back pulsed as my heart panged before it all nummed away in saddened shock as dull grey ignored the surrounding concern around him and looked up to see me a flicker of blue showing there. Hongjoong now looked at me. But our stare remained silent from the weight of occurrences.

Hongjoong didn't take to responding to them, but he began to walk for himself as I got to my feet a bit shaken but sure to cover the pulsing vein in my back with the buttoned white tunic I wore.

It was a blur of thoughts as they hurriedly coaxed the two of us to another merger at the docking ports there. We wordlessly complied, Hongjoong and I, as we both worked to take the merger to where they'd told us: the docking tower above Venelia.

I didn't question where our destination was and neither did Hongjoong. I did, however, realize it had been Hongjoong's hand that had been severed as I took heavy note of his struggle to use his left hand on the lever of the merger. The struggle he had until I silently and gently took the lever from him.

Hongjoong didn't object. He stayed silent that ride as he stayed silent now, here at the empty docking tower above the palace of Venelia of Eastern Court.