Deborah of the Forsaken

Silas - present day

I had been dumbstruck when the Second Reality hauled me from my chair at the Council table to this old training room without any warning. Finding her there was beyond comprehension, looking so much like I'd imagined her again and again in my dreams every night since she'd been taken. I ran to her without thinking, because it was what I always did in that never ending nightmare. I ran to her and crushed her to me, tasted her mouth, felt her body against mine. A real flesh and blood body. Not the kind that would slip into mist and fade through my fingers right before I could hold her again.

She'd said she was dying.

Her frail form beneath my hands made sense now. I was sure my heart had stopped beating, my blood turning to lead in my veins, the oxygen I'd breathed in but a moment ago suddenly too heavy in my lungs. If she died, if she was already dead and this was a spectre the Dual Spark connection enabled me to see, I would follow her into that Great Unknown without a second thought, and would have done so right then and there had she not assured me she was not gone. Yet.

She had no memory of me, of us, seemed so much unlike herself that that alone had me wild with panic. She'd been convinced that the tattoos, her Risen brands, had never been there. Whatever had been done to her had placed a veil over her eyes and her power, and that was the kind of thing only one spesific race had knowledge of. The Forsaken.

She didn't realise it, but the part of herself that connected her to the Spark, her true self, kept screaming for me to save her, that she didn't remember, that someone was hurting and using her. Until her mind was healed and her full power restored, that fractured piece of herself would keep haunting her. All the more reason to find her sooner.

"I will find you," I told her with a smile, imbuing it with false confidence. "I'll find you and bring you home."

I meant every word. Now that we'd made contact again, now that she had access to her power again, the game had changed. Whoever had kept her from me wouldn't be able to do so for much longer now.

Pain and grief so raw flashed through those quicksilver eyes, her gaze cutting sharply to my own as her lip curled in a snarl. "My home is gone. My husband is a fraud. And you are nothing but the fever dream of a half dead woman."

A half dead woman...

My blood raced in my ears with urgency. "You won't die. Tell me where you are."

"No!" she yelled at the same time her fractured self whispered into her mind, Give control to me. I'll take us back.

I tried again, "Whether you tell me or not-"

"Goodbye, Silas."

I blinked, and she was gone once again.

Falling to my knees, I pressed my fists on the floor to keep me steady, my chest heaving with unsteady breaths. Her husband's face tore through my mind. I fought down the urge to vomit.

"I'll kill him!" I screamed to the empty hall, punching a hole in the glittering floor, numb to the physical jolt of my knuckles splitting open on impact. All I could see was that face floating around me like a spectre.

It was only after the initial rage burned through me that the recognition hit like a ton of bricks, yanking my subconscious back to the night Deborah had been taken.