Naturally, I don't have to wait until tomorrow for excitement.
My dreams are filled with the weight of faceless bodies on top of me, smothering me, and holding me down. I'm screaming with all I've got even as I feel their hands grabbing me and tugging me in every direction. There are so many hands that I can't even tell how many there are. A pair starts shaking my shoulders and sound finally breaks through. "Kaira!" Mor shouts but when my eyes open, I can barely see her frantic brown ones amidst all the shadows billowing from me. Another voice joins hers, but I can't quite make it out. "I don't know! I don't know!" She shouts before I see a pair of hazel eyes hovering above me.
"LEASH THE SHADOWS!" He thunders and it's the loudest I've ever heard him.
How, how, how, how.
"Pull them back in like breathing in air!" Azriel specifies and I take a deep breath which calms the shadows marginally. He nods and I know that this is a step in the right direction. Smooth hands vanish as scarred ones take their place and I focus on the feeling of them as I take another deep breath. My hand reaches out and I put it over Azriel's chest to feel him breathe with me despite his racing heart. In through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Bit by bit the shadows retreat back into me and the deep curls at my back. The three of us are breathless as we look around the room to find every piece of furniture smashed and blackened as if the shadows stained it.
"I'm-"
"There's no need to apologize," Azriel tells me firmly and I don't flinch when he runs a hand over my sweaty forehead. He takes my hands in his as I sit up with a wince, then my stomach roils. I don't bother trying to stand and instead winnow into the bathroom before emptying the contents of my stomach into the porcelain. My whole body burns from soreness along with my throat and nose from puking. I'm not sure whose hands pull back my hair, but I'm grateful all the same.
When I've emptied everything in my stomach, and most of my organs besides, it's deathly quiet. "Is there anything I can do for you?" Azriel's voice murmurs as cool and calm as the shadows around us. He releases my hair as I sit on the floor to face him with my body crying out in the process. Mor has vanished somewhere and I don't have the energy to ask where.
"Water," I respond softly and he instantly moves, grabbing a glass and filling it before returning to me. He doesn't wait for my heavy arm to lift before tilting the glass and I take tentative sips. Our eyes are locked on one another as he reads when I need more and when to pull back. He allows me to have my silence as long as I want it which is until the glass is empty. Then he sets it aside. "What..." I'm not sure how to finish the question, but he seems to know anyway.
"The shadows can get...unruly. They can react to dreams as well as reality." He tells me evenly and I don't look away from him.
"Do you see my dreams?" I ask quietly and he nods once.
"Sometimes."
"Then you know...you know that some of them are not fiction." I watch him carefully and see cold fire flicker to life in his eyes, then vanish.
"Yes." He answers gently and I take a breath.
"Does that matter to you?" I ask and I'm not sure why it matters to me, why it would hurt if it did. "Do you think differently of me knowing that I'm sullied?"
"No." He answers instantly and I feel the honesty of the word press against me. "You are not that to me. You are not what happened to you." I find myself accepting his words as fact simply for the conviction that he says them with. But knowing and believing are two different things. I take a deep breath and rise on shaky feet, happily accepting his hand as my muscles ache.
YOU ARE READING
Shadowsinger
Fanfiction"Perhaps this is death and it's playing a game with me. Maybe that's all death is, reliving the moment it took those that you most loved." Kaira's life ends with her family in the cold snow on the edge of the wall dividing fae and human lands. She's...
