Chapter 24 | Part 2 | The Fall

It took her mid-step.

One foot on frozen ground, the other lifting, and between those two motions the world folded. No warning flash. No buildup of pressure behind her eyes, no copper taste, no numbness in her extremities. Those were the symptoms she’d learned to read, the signals her body gave before a vision arrived. This time there were no signals. This time the vision didn’t arrive.

It reached out and took her.

The ground hit her face. She registered the impact the way a drowning person registers the color of the sky, distantly, as irrelevant information filed away by a brain already occupied with catastrophe. Her cheekbone struck a root. Her teeth clacked together and she tasted blood where her lip split against them. Her hands didn’t come up to break the fall because her hands had stopped belonging to her.

“Maris!”

Balin’s voice. Young, sharp with fear. She heard it from a long way off, through water, through stone, through the membrane that was tearing between her mind and somewhere else.

She tried to say his name. Her mouth wouldn’t form the shapes. Her tongue had gone thick and foreign in her mouth, a piece of meat that didn’t know language.

Hands on her shoulders. Rolling her onto her back. The canopy of dark trees spinning above her, branches braiding and unbraiding against a sky that was the wrong color. Too bright. Pulsing.

“Hold her head. Hold her head steady.” Eldric’s voice now, calm with the particular flatness of a man who’d stabilized wounded soldiers and knew that panic was a contagion you couldn’t afford. “Xandor, her nose.”

Blood. She could feel it running from both nostrils, warm tracks sliding toward her ears. More blood than the usual nosebleeds, thicker, coming faster. Xandor’s fingers pressed cloth beneath her nose and the cloth was soaked through in seconds.

“This is different,” Xandor said. She heard him clearly despite the distance growing between her and the forest. His voice arrived as though transmitted through the trunk of a tree, vibrating along the wood. “This isn’t a regular vision. Her pupils are uneven. The left is fully dilated.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we hold her still and we don’t let her bite through her tongue.”

She wanted to tell them it wasn’t a seizure. That she was aware, present, conscious of every hand gripping her, every word spoken above her. She wanted to tell them that the problem wasn’t her body. The problem was that something had hooked into the back of her skull and was pulling, gently at first and then with a force she couldn’t resist, pulling her consciousness out of this forest, off this frozen ground, away from these people, toward a place she could feel but couldn’t see.

The Beacon screamed.

Not pulsed. Not hummed. Screamed. Even through the canvas of Dulint’s pack, even muffled by cloth and distance and whatever dampening Xandor had placed on it, the artifact emitted a sound that wasn’t sound, a frequency that bypassed ears and went straight to the center of the brain where nightmares lived. Dulint cursed and threw the pack off his back. Balin stumbled away from it. Eldric’s hand went to his sword, trained reflex against an enemy that steel couldn’t touch.

Maris felt the scream inside her chest. It resonated with the pulling force, harmonized with it, and the two together were irresistible. The membrane between her mind and the elsewhere tore like wet paper.

She could feel them holding her body. Dulint’s thick fingers wrapped around her wrist, anchoring. Balin’s palm against her forehead, warm and trembling. Xandor doing something at the edge of her perception, murmuring words that might have been medicine or prayer or both.

She could feel all of that and it wasn’t enough.

The elsewhere was stronger.

It came at her like a tide. Black water rising through the floor of her consciousness, filling the spaces between thoughts. Cold. Not winter cold, not ice cold. An absence of warmth so complete it had texture, a velvet nothingness that pressed against every surface of her mind.

Her body arched off the ground. She heard Eldric swear. She felt Balin’s hand slip from her forehead and return, pressing harder.

“Don’t let her move. If she seizes, protect her head, let the limbs go.”

Professional words. Practical words. The words of people dealing with the body while the person inside it was being stolen.

The black water rose to her chin. Her throat. The corners of her eyes. She couldn’t breathe, which was impossible because she wasn’t actually in water, she was lying on frozen ground in a forest with four people holding her down. But the signal from her lungs was clear. No air. No air. Drowning.

This isn’t how it works.

That was her last thought as herself. Her last moment of clinical observation, the detached analyst’s voice that had carried her through years of visions and nosebleeds and waking screams. This isn’t how visions work. They don’t take you. You go to them. You observe. You don’t participate. You don’t drown.

This isn’t how it works.

The black water closed over her head.

And she was somewhere else entirely, wearing someone else’s fear like a second skin, looking through eyes that weren’t hers at a place that shouldn’t exist.

End of Chapter 24.2 —> 24.3: The Clear Sight: The Drowning Man