Chapter 14 - Darius - Triggers

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"Darius?"

Gods that felt like taking one of Arthur's full-blown punches to the gut, times two. One minute I was practicing a maneuver Arthur taught me cycles ago, and the next all of the air in my lungs rushed out and my stomach twisted. At first, I thought it was Clarice - that something happened to her – but then I looked up from the ground that I was hunched over and found someone blinking in and out by a nearby tree. There and then gone, and then there and gone again. Like a flickering light until it finally went out, and she was gone.

"Darius."

"I'm fine, I'm okay."

"What the hell was that?" Alex yells as he and the others form their protective arch around me. Mother hens.

Garrison bends down where I kneel, still catching my breath. I wave him off, feeling the pain disappear. "I don't know."

"Clarice-"

"It wasn't her," I quickly tell Arthur. The pain is leaving, but panic sets in as it does. That felt like something too similar to when I tore through the Dearg Forest to not make me instantly think back to her.

"But-"

I jump back to my feet, already pushing past Arthur and Winston before they can stop me. "It wasn't her."

For all of a cycle, I've been able to keep my worst fears from taking over me entirely, but after meeting the Comandante of the Devil's Pride Fleet and having to tell them why we're out here looking and smelling like we've been run over by a stampede of horses, it's all come back. No one really knows what happened to make me lose control of the elements, but Sibella had her theories after I woke up from being unconscious for eight hours. Not nearly as long as it was when the elements first flooded into mine and Clarice's body, and yet it felt like I used ten times more power than I did then.

She talked about this elemental bond that would link me and Clarice together in a few ways, but ones in which could communicate through unspoken means. The elements could sense the others across any distance, though they'll constantly beg for close proximity. They'll sense when the others are in danger - life-threatening danger. I held onto that, using the silence the elements were giving as a sign that she was still alive and still...okay. I held onto it for all of a few minutes, and then Sibella kept talking. Saying that she thought the elemental bond was the thing that was torn from me. That the elements could no longer sense their opposing partners.

I didn't want to let go of the hope that what the elements gave was suddenly gone. The reassurance and the compass to find her again, but we've been searching for more than six cycles and the elements have revealed nothing. This is the first thing I've felt in six cycles, and it's bringing up the worst of my fears. That she's gone and we're too late.

I scrambled to get it back – to get her back the second I figured out what had happened when I woke up in the cabin, but it was gone. It was the last thing I had of her aside from the memories, and like the snap of a twig, it broke. I didn't feel the pain when the power rose, didn't see anything but red as my feet left the ground and my clothes singed against my flames.

I've avoided the subject to keep these attacks away, but now I find my breathing becoming shorter, my head spinning, my heart pumping faster, and my hands shaking. It first happened three days into our search and continued throughout our journey in Cressida. The boys tried getting me to confess my symptoms to Siscilla and my parents, but I have enough knowledge in the art of healing to recognize a panic attack.

They've since been a no-show – that is until Arthur let it slip and my stomach instantly dropped again.

Something's wrong, a voice screams in my skull.

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