Sevensworn

XV. Petrified Garden

The sun greeted him when he woke. It was a curious feeling; he knew he should be dead and buried but the sun still rose and warmed his skin, treated him like something living and real. He took a breath, thanking it somewhere deep within his chest, and stared up at the ceiling.

Zia was breathing evenly beside him, not yet awake herself, and the events of the night before slowly bled back into his memory. The pain, the dream, the delirious wandering. The voices he had heard were gone now, much to his relief, but in their wake was an almost painful silence. Regardless of the discomfort, he would take it over hallucinations any day; he prayed that they had left him for good.

When he finally mustered the will to push himself painstakingly into a sitting position, Zia stirred beside him, an arm surfacing above the covers and stretching long and hard. She opened her eyes a moment later, bleary and confused.

"G'morning," she said after a moment.

"Morning." He rubbed his eyes, then pushed a hand back through his hair, which was soft and clean. He felt new, alive again, still in pain but no longer a shade that shifted with the wind.

Zia sat up beside him with a groan, yawning before she looked him over. "You look..." she took a moment to find the word. "Better."

"Less dead?" He ventured. Zia gave a half-hearted laugh.

"Yeah. Less dead."

Zia swung her legs over the edge of the bed, standing with reluctance and dragging her feet as she went to grab the clean clothes that had been placed on the chair across the room. She kept her back turned to him, and he looked down at the covers as she moved to change out of her nightclothes.

"Do you want to talk about what happened?"

"What about it?" Ronan's fingers curled in the bedsheets. "I was tired. That was all."

"You were confused about reality," she said softly. "That seems like something that shouldn't go undiscussed."

"Perhaps." He pushed himself up, sighing. Zia tossed him a pair of pants that he slid on gingerly, careful not to bend his torso more than he had to. He spoke again after a moment, when Zia had turned back around sporting a simple black tunic and pants belted at the waist with a red sash. "You know about the Dreamwalking."

"Of course."

The Aldrea line had possessed the ability to commune with their patron deities since the Great War. Each monarch had one god as their guide, and one alone. It was seen as a slap in the face to the believers in the churches who thought themselves more deserving, but the gods had long since gone silent. His father's patron, Hanwey, had stopped sending him signs when Ronan was but a child. Shivaroth's communication with him was a miracle in the eyes of many⁠—no one had expected the crown prince to have a patron at all after the silence, especially not one marked for death.

"I had a dream last night. About one of the Seven."

"Who?"

"Felhan."

"Hm."

"He was angry. We fought, Shivaroth showed up near the end, and they spoke. It seemed just as clear as the rest of the world, Zia. I just needed to make sure that when I woke up it was all real."

She eyed him. "How can you tell? You believed me, but why?"

"You promised," he said after a moment. "And I trusted you. Now I can see it for myself⁠—the feeling that comes with a dream isn't present, this is real."

"Do you think the dream was something more? Some sort of communication?"

"I don't know." Ronan stood with a slow exhale, recalling the terror and uncertainty of the night before. "I'd have to ask Shivaroth. It may have just been a dream."