A SYMPHONY OF SHADOWS | grishaverse

.xiv.

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fourteen

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Nerezza wasn't scared.

It wasn't that kind of nightmare.

No, as the 16 year old tossed in her sheets, clutching her stiletto blade in her sleep, she wasn't scared.

But there were shocking events occurring behind her closed eyelids.

In her dreams, she was back in the fold.

Her face was getting torn into by countless claws.

Her side was getting slashed and ripped to bloody shreds.

But this time, it was different.

She was dreaming of the fold.

She never dreamt of the fold.

The Suli girl only ever managed to have elements of PTSD plague her night terrors. The only things that came to her in sleep were the things she witnessed in Ketterdarm.

The murder of her parents.

The life starved and poor.

The mission gone awry.

Those were her nightly visitations.

In her nightmares, Nerezza was usually chained to a chair again, unable to comprehend whether it was night or day or realise how much time had passed. Her mouth was full of blood and so were her clothes. The smell of burning flesh was all around her – was it hers, she couldn't remember?

Nerezza didn't remember what happened in those weeks, chained and tortured.

The memories came back in flashes, or in her dreams.

Tonight was different, though.

Her dreams were of the unsea.

The endless chasm of shadows that stretched as far as the eye could see, enveloping her in its obsidian embrace.

Could you call it a nightmare? She didn't know.

She was vaguely aware that she was dreaming. Could you think in a dream? She didn't know that either.

Nerezza stood there, on the skeleton body of the burned and broken skiff, and realised the place was deserted.

She could sense volcra were above her – but she couldn't hear them, they were too far away.

It was almost calm.

Content even.

Nerezza touched her face, expecting to feel the bumpy scar, but instead her skin was torn and wounded. When she brought her hand away, her fingers were coated in blood.

Black blood.

She looked down to find the same substance was leaking from the jagged rips in her side.

It didn't hurt.

It was almost as if the substance was liquid shadow.

Liquid shadow, was that even a thing?

She looked to find that the blood/shadow (whatever it was) almost melded with the opaque shadows around her in the air. As if they were one and the same.

Strange.

Nerezza didn't know how long she'd been standing there. Maybe minutes, or hours? She couldn't think.

Of course not, it was a dream.

It was a very peculiar thing, to know that you are dreaming in a dream. She almost wasn't sure of what was real and what wasn't.

She liked the way that the wisps of onyx mulled over her, though, she knew that they made her feel safe. Feel calm.

It was as if that pin-point accuracy of notching and shooting a perfectly aimed arrow was consuming her.

But it also felt as if she were sinking into a hot bath, or sitting in front of a roaring fire.

She may have found solace in the dark, but Nerezza despised the cold.

The fold was anything but. To her at least.

It was strange, how powerful and how at ease she felt in this place. Both feelings seemed to juxtapose each other. But it was like she was born to be in this – this abomination of the map.

Now she could understand, fully realise, why Aleksander intrigued her so much.

Because, yes, he made her feel things.

But she realised then that when she was with him – those quiet moments of relief, the same feeling was in the pit of her stomach; safety, shelter, security.

When Nerezza woke up, breathing heavily back in her own bed, it clicked.

Aleksander wasn't just like the shadow fold.

He was the shadow fold.