The Awakening

Chapter Ten

Avelon found herself drifting in total darkness, a feeling akin to floating in the water.

Was she dead?

She had willed herself to wake but had somehow managed to fall into darkness so deep she worried she would not be able to get back to the light. The faint hum of energy, almost like electricity, surrounded her as she floated. She cocked her head to the side, blinking cluelessly at the darkness before her. She could not see or make out anything?

What is that sound?

Shortly after yelling at herself to wake up, she slammed back into her body- dragged by a force stronger than anything she had ever felt before.

Returning to her body after her outer body experience was nothing short of disorienting. She had felt like a foreigner when she re-entered her body. At first, she had thought she had imagined everything, then the burning had raged on. She was unable to move as the burning ravaged her and silent screams erupted inside her head.

The sensation was so intense, she felt herself wishing to escape it again.

Darkness enveloped her soon after re-entering her body. Then she was floating, falling, and standing still all simultaneously. Struggling to grasp what exactly was happening, she had tried yelling into the void. Her voice had been flat, no echo resounding as though the vastness of the darkness was never-ending.

"Wake up!" She yelled into the void, the familiarity of her words roused nausea within her. She could feel her body and soul tug back at the request, yanking her towards reality.

Her senses returned slowly- too slowly. First, and most importantly, she regained the ability to feel her own limbs. Inch by inch her skin prickled as her nerve endings woke. She grappled with the weight of the new blood coursing through her veins.

She felt different. A stranger in her own body.

The power that rumbled from the foreign blood within her, raged against the confines of her body, testing the limits of her resilience. The faint hum of power that she had heard inside of the void, rang in her ears as she awoke. The hum of sound was the new blood enveloping and infusing with her own.

She could feel it, the new blood, thrumming with power. It felt as though it whispered control of distant shores and stormy skies. She almost smiled as it resembled Uisce so perfectly. The reminder sent a wave of comfort through her body. It was as though home coursed through her, warming her heart and soul. It pulsed against her own blood like a wave. A rhythm out of sync or a dance of two souls uneasily tethered. Her heart laboured against her chest, each throb was a battle between old and new. Her essence was still fighting against the new intrusion of foreign blood.

With every anxious breath, she fought valiantly, defying each attempt at her body succumbing back into darkness. The burning had faded, so she could tolerate the rest. Revulsion flooded her senses as she thought about what exactly had transpired. How could something so frowned upon go so unnoticed? Someone had to have noticed Balor's strange hobby.

Her body convulsed once, twice, trying and failing to reject the blood that promised both salvation and destruction. Unwillingly her body settled, accepting the fact that she was now embedded with someone else's life essence. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to wake herself. Nausea churned and overruled as she turned her head sideways, expelling all the contents of her stomach.

To her utter surprise and dismay, the colour red did not splatter along with the other fluids being expelled by her body. Which had only meant that whatever Balor and Elha had planned, worked. Her waking up meant that her body did not reject the blood.