Book I: Near Death Experience (18+) ✔️

40.

Another needle pressed into my neck as I hissed in pain, feeling the contents push their way into my bloodstream. My neck became heavy, my hair messily falling in front of my face as I stared at the pacing man before me.

"Please don't do this, Elijah. You don't have to," the desperation in my voice mirrored the helplessness that gripped me.

Elijah lowered himself beside my head, his lips next to my ear as he whispered, "I promise you...it will not hurt. Your heart will slowly give out from the loss of your magic; you will simply fall asleep."

His words, though spoken with a false reassurance, carried a weight of inevitability that settled over me like a suffocating shroud. Elijah's proximity, once a source of comfort, now felt like the embodiment of my impending demise. A simple kiss on my temple seemed both tender and cruel, the final touch before the descent into an abyss from which I would not return.

A solitary tear traced a path down my cheek, a silent testament to the agony that accompanied the acceptance of my mortality. This was it. There was no escape, no reprieve. I was going to die, not at the hands of a faceless foe, but by the betrayal of a man I had begun to trust, someone I might've even called a friend.

The realization was a bitter pill to swallow, a profound ache that transcended the physical toll of the impending magical extraction. In that sombre moment, as Elijah prepared to unravel the threads of my existence, I grappled with the harsh truth that death was not always the result of external forces; sometimes, it was the consequence of misplaced trust and the betrayal of those we dared to let into the sacred spaces of our lives.

I was really going to die.

I felt his hands placed on each of my temples, his fingers moving through my hair before tightening his grip slightly. The tender touch, once soothing, now conveyed an unsettling sense of finality. His sigh was a whispered admission of the gravity of the act he was about to commit. As he took a deep breath, it felt like the air itself carried the weight of the impending magical extraction.

And then I felt it.

The gradual drain, a slow and inexorable unravelling of the magical tapestry woven within me. It started as a subtle tug, a gentle pull that intensified with each passing moment. The very core of my being seemed to convulse, a silent protest against the theft of the energies that defined me.

Elijah's grip tightened his hands now conduits for the malevolent force that drained the essence of my magic. The sensation was both ethereal and agonizing, a paradoxical dance between the mystical and the painful. As the magical currents ebbed away, my body responded with a growing weakness, and profound exhaustion that permeated every fibre of my being.

At that moment, I became acutely aware of the fragility of the boundary between life and death. The fine thread that connected me to existence was unravelling, slipping away with each passing second. Elijah's betrayal manifested not only in the physical toll but in the profound realization that the very source of my vitality was being callously taken from me.

This was it.

"Please," I cried into my thoughts, a desperate plea echoing in the recesses of my mind, hoping that maybe, just maybe, they could hear me. The silence that followed was deafening, and the weight of impending darkness pressed upon me.

With my final thoughts, I summoned the courage to utter the one thing I had been holding in for so long. A sentiment too long suppressed, too afraid to acknowledge, but now, in the face of imminent demise, I let it resound in the depths of my consciousness.

"I love you both, and I'm sorry," I proudly declared within my thoughts. The words carried the weight of a final confession, a heartfelt admission that transcended the barriers of silence. In the vulnerability of that moment, I hoped that the echoes of my emotions would reverberate through the invisible threads that connected our minds.