Part Twenty-Nine — The Night It Started

　I woke because I couldn't move.

　Not paralyzed exactly――worse than that, somehow.

　Every muscle answered a half-second too late, like my own body had been wrapped in something thick and unseen, holding me a fraction of an inch behind my own reactions.

　My eyes opened.

　My mouth wouldn't.

What――

　Doran was already moving, blade in hand, a shape torn out of sleep and into motion faster than I'd ever seen him manage.

"KAI――"

　I couldn't answer him.

　I couldn't do anything except lie there, aware, useless, watching shapes resolve out of the dark treeline around our camp――too many, too coordinated, moving with the specific silence of people who'd done this exact thing before and expected it to go smoothly.

They came for me.

　This whole binding, whatever it is――it's built for me specifically.

　They knew what I could do before they got here.

They knew, and they came anyway.

　Fenrik was up an instant after Doran, weapon already in hand, placing himself between me and the nearest shape without a moment's hesitation.

"Get him out of here!" Doran shouted, already meeting the first attacker head-on, steel ringing against something that wasn't quite steel. "Whatever this is, it's not us they――"

　I didn't hear the rest.

　Someone had my legs, dragging me sideways out of the firelight, and I understood, distantly, uselessly, that this was exactly the plan――pin me somewhere safe from my own uncontrolled power, and let the two of them absorb whatever came next.

No.

No, that's backward.

That's completely backward.

　It's supposed to be me standing between them and this.

　Not the other way around.

　I fought the binding with everything I had.

　And I want to be honest.

　It wasn't enough.

　Whatever held me had been built by people who'd studied exactly what they were dealing with.

　My anti-mana strained against it.

　Flickered.

　Found no purchase.

Come on.

Come ON.

Not now.

Not tonight.

Anytime but tonight――

　What I actually remember after that comes in pieces.

　And I've never been able to fully trust the order they go in.

　I remember Doran's voice, further away than it should have been, saying something I couldn't make out over the ringing in my own ears.

　I remember a sound that might have been Fenrik.

　Might have been someone else entirely.

　Cut off too fast to identify which.

　I remember light――not fire, something colder, something that scorched the air the way the merchant's story had once described, years ago, on a road I hadn't thought about in longer than I should have gone without thinking about it.

　I remember trying to scream and producing nothing at all, the binding taking even that small thing from me.

　I remember the exact moment the fighting sounds stopped being two distinct voices and became something quieter.

　And how much worse that quiet was than any of the noise before it.

　I don't remember losing consciousness.

　I only remember, at some point, that I wasn't conscious anymore.

　No clean line between the last thing I was aware of and the void that came after it.

　Just an ending.

　Sudden.

　Total.

　The way a candle doesn't dim before it's blown out.

　Whatever happened in the minutes after that――the parts I couldn't see, couldn't move to stop, couldn't even fully hear――I would spend a long time afterward wishing I'd been given the mercy of not needing to find out.

　I would find out anyway.

　Just not yet.