OathBlade (Wattys2015)

75. Into Her Burrow*

Elery tried to turn her head, but...

Am I?

Her own thoughts were terrifying. They screamed when they meant to whisper, yet there was no sound. Her body was numb. She kicked—or thought to—but there was no sensation.

It was the closest to death she could imagine. She tried to scream but there was no sound. There was no feeling of air leaving her lungs. No sensation of her throat constricting in a way that could make sound.

She felt as if her arms were curled around something, but there was nothing there.

She remembered that she should have had hold of Isandel. Where had he gone?

Why had he thrown her into this horrid place?

Deep howls rumbled. Below? Above? How can I know? She tried to turn her head but the lack of sensation, the lack of anything, left her questioning whether she had moved at all. The sounds continued. They grew closer.

She tried to scream again.

Stop.

This voice was foreign but familiar. It was not her own. It was not a voice, yet it was also not a thought. It was...something. A feeling?

Trust me.

As deep as the blackness was, something even darker lurked around her. Slick, oily shadows swept past. To say she saw them with her eyes would have been inaccurate. She saw them with something else, but she could not understand what. By then even simple thought was beyond her grasp.

Her mind grew quiet. She stopped trying to move. She stopped trying to scream. She, at the very least, thought she did. She watched the shadows sweep closer.

Then, in a bright flash of light, everything changed.

Sensation returned to her body. She heard screams and the clash of metal. She hung limp in Isandel's arms as he ran with her and spoke the same six words like a mantra.

"It's going to be all right."

She flexed her fingers first, testing her connection to her own body. It was as if she'd been lifted out of her own form, disconnected from all she was. It was a sensation, rather a lack of sensation, that went far beyond frightening. Beyond even terrifying. There was no word in any language that could explain what she felt.

No word other than dead.

She shuddered and jerked upright, nearly slipping from Isandel's grasp. Everything returned at once and she cried out as she wrapped her arms so tightly round his neck she might have snapped his spine if he were but another seryn.

He breathed a sigh of relief and said, "You are all right. Forgive me, but we could not take the long route."

"Wh-what...What...?" She struggled to grasp what had happened. She looked behind them.

The rune beast was far from them. They'd crossed more than half of the city.

"A bulk of the group, led by Vydel and Dakkan, have already infiltrated the tunnel leading to the ruins within the mountain," he said as he set her on her feet. "The longer we leave them the farther they will move ahead and the more futile their attempts to clear our path will be. New corpses will have likely moved in behind them."

She stumbled as he urged her to run. After such a total lack of self it felt almost as though she'd forgotten how to move on her own. It was knowledge quickly regained and she found herself keeping pace beside him, dodging around corpses and broken buildings alike.