Chapter 70: His Pain

Azura’s POV (in Rhydor’s body)

Not this again.

I knew before I even looked up. The weight gave it away immediately. That crushing heaviness was settling into every bone like someone had poured iron inside me while I was not paying attention. My fingers felt thick. My legs felt like tree trunks rooted to the ground. Even breathing took more effort than it should have.

I was in his body.

Again.

My own face was looking down at me. His expression sitting on my features, cold and completely unreadable, his gold light flickering behind my grey eyes in a way that made my stomach turn.

I had watched that stillness on his face across campfires, during arguments, in quiet moments that should have cracked it open and never did. But seeing it sitting on my own face was something I would never get used to.

We had done this before. Both of us knew what it was. The curse did as it pleased, when it pleased, and our feelings about that had stopped mattering a long time ago.

"Breathe," he said through my mouth.

His voice coming out of my lips still made something in me go sideways. But it wasn’t his voice anymore, it was mine.

Too high. Too soft. The kind of voice that had never made anyone stand up straight in their entire life. And yet the words were still his, certain and flat, and the wrongness of it sat deep in my chest.

The pain hit before I could answer him.

I screamed through locked teeth. The sound stayed trapped inside his chest, vibrating through his ribs, going absolutely nowhere.

My whole body locked up with the effort of holding it in and my jaw ached from how hard I was pressing it together. I stayed on one knee with his massive hand pressed flat against the shoulder and breathed through my nose and waited for it to pull back even slightly.

It did not pull back.

"Breathe slowly," he said again. Same tone. Like he was giving directions to someone who had taken a wrong turn.

"Breathing is not helping." My voice came out rough and low, nothing like mine. "Every time I breathe the skin around the shoulder pulls with it. It makes it worse, not better."

He said nothing back.

Just looked at me with my own face wearing his patience.

I looked up at him and felt something move inside me that had nothing to do with the pain. Something quieter and harder to explain.

"How?" I said.

The word came out wrong. Too thick. Too heavy.

"How have you been doing everything with this living inside you?" I pressed his hand harder against his shoulder. It did not help. Nothing helped.

"How have you been fighting? And leading? And standing in front of people like nothing is wrong?" The pain made it hard to keep going. Hard to think. Hard to breathe.

"You carried me on your back through this entire forest." My voice cracked.

"Through everything this place threw at us. You carried me, and you talked, and you kept walking the whole time."

The words were falling apart now. I could feel them breaking.

"With this feeling?"

I squeezed my eyes shut.

"This feels exactly like what dying must feel like."

He was quiet. Long enough that I thought he was going to say nothing at all the way he sometimes did when something got too close to a place he did not want touched.

Then he said, "Pain stops being a big deal after a while. That is just how life works."

I stared at him.

I turned those words over slowly inside my head. Looked at them from every direction I could find. Tried to understand what kind of life had to happen to a person before they could say something like that.

Not with bitterness. Not with anger or self-pity. Just simply. As if it were a fact about the world that everyone eventually learned and he had just learned it earlier than most.

What had he been through?

What losses. What kind of pain had stacked itself up inside him until it just became the background of existing and he stopped expecting it to ever go away.

I wanted to ask. The question was sitting right there ready to come out.

The pain came back before I could open my mouth.

Deeper this time. Past the surface and into something further inside, something that felt like it had wrapped itself around the actual bone and was squeezing and burning from two directions at the same time.

My vision went soft at the edges. I pressed his hand against his shoulder and felt the wrongness underneath the skin. That dark thing coiled around the bone like a vine that had been growing there for a long time and had no plans to leave.

My eyes went hot before I could stop them.

Tears came out. One and then another, running down his jaw, feeling completely wrong on his face. My body had made that decision entirely without my permission, and by the time I understood what was happening, it was already done.

Rhydor looked at me.

His expression on my face was flat and direct and offered nothing.

"Don’t do that," he said.

I blinked through the blur. "Do what?"

"Cry." He said it like he was telling me not to touch something hot. Just a fact. No emotion. "Alphas don’t cry over a little pain."

I went very still inside his body.

I looked up at my own face, saying those exact words to me, and felt something hot and sharp move through his chest that had absolutely nothing to do with the wound.

"Little pain," I said.

The words came out low and controlled.

"I feel like I am dying right now. In this exact moment. Something inside this shoulder is actively working to kill me from the inside and you are standing there in my body calling it little pain."

He looked at me for exactly one second.

Then he stood up.

Just like that. Done. He stood up in my body, managing my bad hip with carefully practiced steps, and looked at the ground near my feet like the last thirty seconds had simply not taken place.

"Pick up the axes," he said.

I looked at the two weapons lying in the grass beside me. Dark metal. Worn leather wrapped around the handles. Each one was built for hands that were currently mine.

"If I move this arm," I said, carefully and clearly, "I am completely convinced it is going to rip straight off my body. Just detach from the shoulder entirely and that will be the end of it."

Rhydor rolled my eyes. Using my own face against me.

I had genuinely never seen my eyes do that before. Well, because I don’t see what my face does, except when I’m looking at the mirror.

"We don’t have time for that," he said. "My strength can handle more than you think. Stop overthinking and just pick them up."

"You pick them up."

He held out my small hands toward me and looked at them. My thin wrists and my pale fingers hanging there in the air between us.

"Your weakness can’t do anything useful with those axes," he said.

I stared at him for a long moment.

"How dare you call me weak."

"I called you weak, yes. The axes, Azura."

"We are going to come back to that conversation."

"We are absolutely not. Pick up the axes and let’s move before something in this forest notices we have been standing in one place for too long."

I looked at him with every drop of annoyance this body had available. Which in his body felt like a significant amount. The anger sat differently in here. Heavier. Hotter. Like it had actual physical weight behind his ribs.

Then I noticed something that made me pause.

He had turned my face into his expression. That completely flat bored look he wore every single day like he had come into the world already wearing it.

Blank and closed and utterly unreadable, sitting on my features like it had always lived there and my face had simply been waiting its whole life for someone to show it how to look like this.

Yes, I made bored expressions sometimes, but right now my face was wearing his walls as if they belonged to it.

I shook my head and bent down.

Picked up the first axe with his right hand.

It weighed nothing. Genuinely absolutely nothing. Like picking up a small branch from the ground. I almost laughed out loud at how easy it was after everything I had just said about my arm coming off.

I picked up the second one.

Also nothing.

I stood up straight, holding both axes, one in each hand, and turned to give him the look. The specific one that meant are you satisfied now, was the whole speech necessary? Do you feel better about yourself?

I opened my mouth.

And stopped.

Because behind him, above the treeline in the distance, something was rising into the grey morning sky that had not been there before.

Smoke.

Thin, pale, and completely steady, curling up slowly and unbothered above the silver trees like it had been doing this every single morning for years. Not dark. Not wild. Not the kind that meant something was wrong or burning out of control.

This was deliberate. Patient. Calm.

I pointed at it without saying anything first.

"Rhydor."

He raised one of my eyebrows very slowly. "Don’t tell me the other hand is hurting from picking up an axe."

"No." I kept pointing. "Look behind you."

He turned slowly, still careful with my hip, and looked at where my finger was aimed.

We both went quiet at exactly the same moment.

The forest settled into that particular Wraithfen silence around us. The kind that felt like it was paying attention. The kind that listened back.

"Maybe it is the group," I said. His chest made my voice come out low and steady. "Maybe they are burning something on purpose. A signal. So we can trace the smoke and find our way back to where they are."

Rhydor looked at the trail of smoke for a long moment without moving.

Then he shook his head slowly.

"That smoke does not come from something burning out in the open. A signal fire would be darker. Thicker. Almost black." He looked at the pale, thin line rising steadily and light above the treeline. "That smoke is too light. Too controlled. It is coming from something enclosed. Something with walls holding the heat inside it."

I looked at the silver trees standing between us and wherever that smoke was rising from. I thought about what kind of thing had walls in a forest like this one.

"Like a building," I said.

He nodded once. "Exactly."

I frowned. "Who would have a home in a place like this?"

Rhydor looked at the smoke and did not answer immediately. He just stood there in my small body with my bad hip, my short legs, my face, and he looked at that pale trail rising above the Wraithfen, and whatever he was thinking about stayed exactly where it always stayed.

Behind my eyes.

Somewhere I could not reach.

"We don’t know yet," he said quietly. "But we will find out soon."