Chapter 102: Try To Rest

Azura’s POV

I knew it before I saw it. That particular cold that had nothing to do with temperature, pressing in from every side, sitting heavy in my lungs with every breath. Grey and thick and completely familiar now in the way things became familiar when they kept coming back whether you invited them or not.

I was standing in the middle of it.

And she was there.

Not running this time. Not moving at all. She was standing completely still, facing me, her hood up and her face hidden the way it always was, like the one thing this vision had decided it was never going to give me was that. The baby was in one arm, limp and sleeping against her, one small hand hanging loose outside the cloth it was wrapped in.

I looked at her, and she looked back at me from inside the shadow of her hood, and neither of us moved for a moment.

Then she raised her other arm.

She pointed.

I turned my head and looked through the mist in the direction she was pointing. The grey parted just enough. A mountain. Dark and jagged against whatever sky existed behind it, rising up out of the mist with the kind of presence that suggested it had been there long before anything else and intended to be there long after. At its base, barely visible through the shifting grey, a cave. Black and completely still, like an open mouth that had been waiting a long time for someone to walk into it.

"Find it." Her voice was soft and urgent at the same time, two things that should not exist together in the same sound. "You do not have much time."

"Find what?" I stepped toward her. "Where is this? Where am I supposed to go?"

She pointed again. More insistent this time. Her arm extended and her finger aimed at the mountain like she was personally responsible for making sure I understood.

"Find it," she said again.

The mist thickened around her. I watched her edges begin to dissolve into it, the outline of her going soft and uncertain the way it always did right before she disappeared.

"Wait." I moved toward her faster. "Tell me what I am looking for. Tell me where that mountain is. You always do this, you show me things and then you go and I am left with nothing useful." My voice rose slightly. "You help in the worst possible way, do you know that? Every single time."

Her outline blurred further. The arm with the pointing finger faded first. Then the baby. Then her shoulders and her hooded head and the last thing to go was the shape of her feet standing in the mist.

And then she was gone.

And the mist was just mist.

****

I sat up fast.

The breath came back to me in a rush and my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my throat. The room was dark around me, the particular dark of early morning before the light had decided to commit to anything, and I pressed both hands flat against the mattress and held onto it and tried to remember where I was.

Hollowcrown. Torin’s house. The room I had been sleeping in for a week.

The pendant was warm against my chest. It was always like that after the visions. Like it knew before I did when something was coming and had already been paying attention long before I opened my eyes in that mist. I pressed my palm against it and felt the warmth of it moving against my skin.

"Are you okay?"

I looked up.

Rhydor was standing in the doorway.

I blinked at him. My mind was still half somewhere between the mist and the mountain, and his face was real and present and in the doorway of my room, and I was not entirely sure how long he had been there.

"I." I exhaled. "Yes. I am fine."

He looked at my face with the expression he used when he was reading something he was not going to comment on. Like he was taking in more than what I was saying and filing it somewhere I did not have access to.

"Go back to sleep," he said.

"You do not have to stay," I started.

"Sleep," he said. Flat and final, cutting across whatever I had been about to finish saying.

He crossed the room and sat down in the chair near the window. He settled into it as if he had already decided he was there for the duration, and the chair’s opinion on the matter was irrelevant.

I looked at him sitting there.

Then I lay back down and pulled the blanket up to my chin and stared at the ceiling.

I told my body to sleep.

My body had other ideas.

The shaking started small. Just my hands at first, a slight tremor I noticed when I pressed them flat against my stomach. Then my shoulders. Not cold. Not fear exactly. Just the aftermath of something, the way the body sometimes processed things after the fact that it could not process during.

I stared at the ceiling and willed it to stop.

It did not stop.

I opened my eyes fully and looked at the pale dark above me, listened to the quiet of the house, and thought about the mountain. The jagged dark shape of it. The cave at its base. The urgency in her voice, saying you do not have much time, like a clock somewhere was already counting down to something I did not know about yet.

"You are still awake."

His voice came from the chair. Not accusatory. Just observing.

"I cannot sleep," I said, honestly.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. The shaking was still there, moving through me in small waves that I could not reason my way out of. I pressed my chin to my knees and stared at the wall and tried to make it stop through sheer stubbornness.

The chair moved.

His footsteps crossed the room. The mattress shifted slightly as he sat down on the edge of it. Not close enough to touch. Just close enough that I could feel the warmth of him in the air between us, that particular heat that was always slightly higher than a normal person’s.

"Try to rest," he said quietly.

I looked at him sitting on the edge of the bed in the early morning dark. At the line of his jaw. His hands were resting on his knees, completely still, and the way he was just there, not asking anything, not explaining anything, not doing anything except existing in the same space as me at four in the morning because he had heard something in my breathing from the doorway and had come without being asked.

The shaking slowed.

I did not understand it. There was no reasonable explanation for why his being closer should make any difference to what my body was doing. He was just a person sitting on the edge of a mattress. But something in my chest loosened anyway, some tight-held thing releasing its grip slightly, and the tremors moved from small to smaller and then to nothing.

I did not question it.

I was too tired.

"Thank you," I said. Quiet enough that it almost did not make it out.

"Sleep," he said.

I uncurled my legs and lay back down. The blanket was still warm from where I had been holding it against me. I pulled it back up and turned onto my side away from him and closed my eyes.

His presence sat at the edge of the bed behind me. Warm and still and saying nothing.

My eyes stayed closed.

The mountain was still there in the back of my head. The cave. Her voice said, " Find it, like it was the most important thing and the most obvious thing and the only thing. I turned it over once. Twice.

And then sleep came. Not slowly. Just suddenly it was there and I stopped turning anything over and went somewhere quiet and dark and completely without mist.

****

The light was pale grey and coming through the window at the particular angle it came through at early morning when the sun had not fully committed yet.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling. The room. The sounds of the house settling into the morning around me. Somewhere outside a bird was going through the same notes it always went through. The pendant was cool against my skin.

I sat up slowly.

The chair by the window was empty.

I looked at it for a moment. At the space where he had been sitting for however long before he moved to the bed. At the slight indent in the cushion that was the only evidence that anything had been there at all.

He was gone.

Something moved through my chest. Small and quiet and not anything I was going to name out loud or examine too directly. I looked at the empty chair for one more second. Then I pushed it down and got up.

I dressed quickly. Ran my fingers through my hair. Picked up the journal from the side table and held it for a moment without opening it. Set it back down.

I crossed to the door.

Put my hand on the handle. Took a breath.

Opened it.

And stopped.

My eyes went wide before my brain had finished processing what they were seeing.

The breath caught in my throat and stayed there.