Darkness wrapped around like a thick blanket, heavy and complete. I floated in it, weightless, formless, a consciousness without a body. Pain flickered at the edges of my awareness, a steady pulsing could be felt behind my eyes, but it seed distant, unimportant. I couldn’t rember falling asleep, but I must have.
The peaceful emptiness felt like a gift, a shelter from sothing my mind wasn’t ready to rember.
Voices drifted through the darkness, familiar but strangely distorted, as if reaching from underwater.
"...never seen that much blood from just training..."
"...his nose, his ears..."
"...like his brain was trying to escape..."
I wanted to tell them I was fine, that they shouldn’t worry, but my mouth wouldn’t move. My body remained a distant concept, sothing theoretical rather than physical. The darkness pulled deeper, and the voices faded away.
When awareness returned, light pressed against my eyelids. I managed to crack them open, just slightly. The effort felt monuntal, as if my eyelids weighed more than Finn.
"He moved!" That was Kira’s voice, close by.
"Allaran?" Phinyx leaned into my field of vision, his face unusually serious. "Can you hear ?"
I tried to speak, but produced only a dry rasp. My throat felt like I’d swallowed sand. My tongue lay thick and useless in my mouth.
"Don’t try to talk." Kira appeared beside Phinyx, her brow furrowed with concern. "You’ve been out for almost twenty hours."
Twenty hours? That couldn’t be right. I’d just been running in the training room, pushing for my hundred laps, using Quickstep to...
mory crashed back like a physical blow. The Quickstep spell. The blur of motion. My body moving faster than it was ant to, space itself seed to fold around . Then the collapse, the searing pain in my skull, the feeling of sothing breaking inside my mind.
"Water." The word scraped past my lips, barely audible.
Phinyx disappeared from view, returning monts later with a cup. Kira slid her arm beneath my shoulders, helping lift my head just enough to drink. The water was blissfully cool against my raw throat.
"What happened?" Kira asked, lowering my head back to the pillow. "One minute you were running, the next you were... everywhere at once."
I wanted to explain about Quickstep, about my intelligence reaching level 10, about the breakthrough I’d achieved after months of failure. But forming words required more energy than I possessed. Instead, I managed a single word.
"Later."
"Rest vibe, healing vibe," Phinyx murmured, his hands making gentle gestures above . A familiar warmth washed over my body, dulling the edges of my pain. My eyelids grew heavy once more, and I surrendered to the pull of sleep.
The next ti consciousness returned, the light had changed, casting long shadows across my room. Voices again, but different this ti.
"...running faster than should be possible..." That was Rolen’s deep, asured voice.
"Damian said it’s so kind of magic." Finn, his tone excited despite the circumstances. "Not an ability like ours, but sothing he learned from books."
"Magic?" Rolen sounded skeptical. "Sothing like that exists?"
"Apparently. But it has limits, backlash. Look what it did to him."
I felt a presence near my bed, soone leaning closer to examine .
"The bleeding’s stopped at least." Rolen again, his voice closer now. "But he looks... drained. Like sothing vital was leeched out of him."
"Mia was asking about him." Finn’s voice had softened, grown more personal. "She worries about all of us."
"Your girl’s got a kind heart." Rolen’s tone carried a gentle teasing. "She’s good for you."
"She’s not my..." Finn began, then asked. "You think I have a chance?"
Their voices continued, but I couldn’t hold onto consciousness. The darkness claid once more, deeper and more complete than before.
I dread of running, of movent so pure it transcended physical form. Of space folding around like paper, of distance becoming aningless. In the dream, there was no pain, no limits, just the exhilaration of perfect motion.
The dream fractured when a cool hand pressed against my forehead, startling back to dim awareness.
"Fever’s gone." A voice I recognized imdiately, Damian, the Citadel Master. "His body is recovering."
"But he’s been unconscious for three days." Coco’s higher pitched voice, edged with worry. "Shouldn’t he be waking up by now?"
Three days? Had I really been out that long?
"He overused his neural pathways." Damian’s voice was clinical, detached. "The Quickstep spell requires precise coordination between mind and body. He pushed too far, too fast."
"Will he recover?" Coco asked.
"He’ll be fine." Damian’s certainty left no room for argunt. "Better than fine, actually. His constitution is on the verge of threshold. When he wakes, he’ll be stronger than before."
"But what if..."
"That won’t happen, Coco." Damian cut him off. "Our weapon can’t break so easily."
I wanted to protest, to say I was more than a weapon, but consciousness was already slipping away again. The darkness welcod back like an old friend, and I surrendered to its embrace.
Ti lost all aning in that darkness. I floated, dreamless, weightless, my mind slowly knitting itself back together. Occasionally voices would penetrate the void, my friends checking on , discussing their training, sharing news of Argent. But these monts grew fewer, farther between, until there was only the darkness and , locked in peaceful stasis.
Until the cold hit .
Sharp, biting cold that cut through the darkness like a blade, dragging forcefully back to consciousness. My eyes snapped open, my body jerking upright in reflexive response to the shock.
Wind. I felt wind on my face, a gust so powerful it stung my eyes.
But that was impossible. I was in my room in the spire, recovering from the Quickstep backlash. There shouldn’t be any...
My thoughts froze as my eyes focused on what lay above . Not the familiar ceiling of my room. Not the white panels of the hospital.
Sky. Vast and endless, with multiple clouds moving across its surface. And wrong, fundantally, terrifyingly wrong, because it lacked the familiar green tinge of Argent’s protective barrier.
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