Ester had been sitting beside the bed for so long that the chair seed to have beco part of her own body. The room was closed off, ward by three braziers spread throughout the corners and by a fireplace that had been fed without rest, yet the air remained far too cold. Not a natural cold. Not the kind born from wind, winter, or damp stone. It was a cold that ca from Damon, lying motionless on the mattress, as if his body had beco a silent source of winter.
He was still in a coma.
Nothing had truly changed over the last six days.
Or perhaps everything had changed, only in the wrong direction.
Damon lay face down, the upper half of his body partially uncovered so Ester could maintain direct contact with the main points of Qi circulation. His skin was unnaturally pale, almost translucent in so places, and the spiritual veins beneath the surface looked like crystallized lines crossing muscles, bones, and ridians. To anyone else, they might have looked like nothing more than bluish marks beneath the skin. To Ester, it was far worse. She saw the blockage. Felt the weight. Perceived every frozen stretch like a river interrupted by centuries of winter.
Her hands rested on his back, one near his spine and the other over the area below his left shoulder blade. Her fingers were steady, but trembling with exhaustion. A thin layer of ice constantly ford over her own skin whenever she tried to send energy into his channels, and every ti it happened, she had to force her own Qi to resist the rejection. Damon was not simply frozen. His body was rejecting any external interference, as if even help were being interpreted as an invasion.
Ester drew a deep breath and shut her eyes more tightly.
Within her perception, Damon’s body did not seem like a living body.
It looked like a buried mountain range.
Every ridian was a passage blocked by dense, compact ice. Every node of energy felt like a crystallized chamber, full of accumulated pressure. His frigid Qi did not flow. It did not pulse. It did not circulate. It simply remained there, thick and crushing, occupying everything like a petrified snowstorm inside an abandoned temple. And yet, in so deep places, sothing moved.
That was what kept her awake.
Sothing still moved.
Very little.
Very deep.
But there was resistance.
Damon was still fighting.
She clenched her teeth and pushed another small current of Qi through her palm. The bluish energy descended through her channels and touched the first frozen layer inside him, trying to dissolve the blockage with precision, not force. Brute force had already failed. Heat had failed too. Dispersion techniques had failed. Circulation stimuli had failed. Everything failed when applied directly. Now, Ester was trying to persuade the ice to move, as if speaking to a sleeping beast instead of trying to break a wall.
The result was almost imdiate.
Pain.
Not in Damon.
In her.
An icy shock climbed up Ester’s arms, crossed her shoulders, and bit into the base of her neck with such violence that her eyes snapped open. She held back a sound between her teeth and nearly pulled her hands away, but forced herself to remain in place. Damon’s ice invaded her own circulation like invisible needles, trying to freeze her channels in response. It was an absurd defensive reaction, instinctive and completely wrong.
"No," she murmured, hoarse, her voice scraped raw by exhaustion. "You are not doing this to again."
She closed her eyes again and breathed in short, controlled cycles, trying to expel the invading ice before it reached her own main ridians. The crystals on the tips of her fingers cracked slowly and fell onto the sheet in small, shining fragnts. The temperature in the room plumted for a few seconds, making one of the nearby candles flicker violently before returning to normal.
Or almost normal.
Nothing in that room had felt truly normal for days.
Ester’s blue hair, usually immaculate, was completely disheveled. Loose strands fell around her face, so stuck to her forehead by cold sweat. The shadows beneath her eyes were deep, dark, and pronounced, evidence of entire nights without true rest. She had barely slept since Damon had been brought back. When she closed her eyes, it was only for brief periods, sitting in her own chair, always with one hand on him, as if she feared the absence of contact would be enough to lose him.
On the table beside her were bowls of frozen water, damp cloths, dicine vials, thin blades, energy diagrams, and pages covered in nearly illegible notes. So had been written in ink. Others, with hands so shaky that the lines looked like open wounds on the paper. Ester had redrawn Damon’s Qi channels more than twenty tis, trying to find so pattern in the destruction. So far, the only clear pattern was impossibility.
The door opened softly behind her.
Ester did not turn around.
She felt the presence before she heard the footsteps.
Elizabeth entered the room without hurry, but her expression changed as soon as she saw the other woman’s state. For a few seconds, she remained silent in the doorway, watching Ester bent over Damon, shoulders rigid, hands pressed against his back, her face pale with exhaustion. The cold air touched Elizabeth the mont she entered, and even as a vampire, even accustod to temperatures lower than a human’s, she felt an imdiate discomfort pass across her skin.
The entire room seed to breathe with Damon.
Or perhaps against him.
Elizabeth closed the door carefully and walked to the bed. Her eyes quickly moved over his body, the bandages, the frozen marks, the almost imperceptible breathing. There was sothing cruel about it. Damon had always seed impossible to keep down for long. Irritating, arrogant, resilient, far too impulsive to die conveniently. Seeing him reduced to that silent immobility felt like a violation of the natural order of things.
Then she looked at Ester.
And her concern deepened.
"Ester," she called softly.
The other woman did not answer.
Elizabeth moved a little closer and placed a hand on her back, carefully enough not to startle her. The contact imdiately revealed the absurd tension beneath her muscles. Ester was rigid as stone. Cold. Trembling. Exhausted beyond any reasonable limit. For an instant, Elizabeth wanted to simply pull her away by force, but she knew that would end with so kind of glacial explosion and perhaps very well-phrased insults.
"You need to rest," Elizabeth said, keeping her voice firm but gentle. "There is no point in continuing to try in this state. You will destroy your own body before you save his."
Ester let out a small, dry laugh completely devoid of humor.
"I already tried to stop."
Elizabeth’s brow furrowed slightly.
"When?"
"Four hours ago. Maybe five. I don’t rember."
"And?"
Ester did not remove her hands from Damon.
"His core temperature dropped imdiately. The channels began contracting again. If I move away for too long, the ice advances."
Elizabeth was silent for a mont. That explained many things. It explained why Ester looked like soone on the verge of collapse. It explained why no one could convince her to leave the room. It explained why the entire mansion seed to walk on tiptoe around that door.
Even so, this could not continue.
"You are not an eternal anchor," Elizabeth said. "If you fall, we lose you too."
"Then replace with soone capable."
"We do not have anyone capable."
The answer was too direct to be gentle.
Ester finally opened her eyes, but kept staring at Damon’s back instead of looking at Elizabeth.
"Then don’t ask to leave."
Elizabeth took a deep breath, controlling her own impatience. She understood the logic. She understood the guilt. She understood the terror hidden beneath that stubbornness. Ester was not rely treating Damon. She was fighting a solitary battle against sothing she did not fully understand, and every failure felt personal. For soone like her, admitting helplessness was perhaps more painful than freezing her own nerves.
"I asked Morgana to buy a Dragon Heart," Elizabeth said.
The sentence finally made Ester turn her head.
Slowly.
Her eyes were red with exhaustion.
"What?"
Elizabeth held her gaze.
"With all the remaining money we managed to recover from the vaults of the destroyed mansion. What was left after the fire, the urgent debts, and the evacuation of the survivors. Morgana approved it."
Ester stared at her for several seconds, as if trying to decide whether she had heard correctly.
"A Dragon Heart."
"Yes."
"You’ve gone insane."
"Not recently."
"Elizabeth."
"It is an option."
"It is a desperate option."
"We are exactly at that stage."
Ester closed her eyes for an instant, and this ti she seed more irritated than tired. When she opened them again, there was a spark of life in that exhaustion, which Elizabeth considered minimal progress, even if unpleasant.
"A dragon heart is unstable, violent, and full of aggressive life essence. If they place that near him in his current state, his body may try to absorb everything at once and enter complete collapse."
"Or it may give his body enough energy to survive the thawing."
"Or it may explode his organs."
"He has already almost frozen his own organs."
"That argunt is terrible."
"But it isn’t wrong."
Ester hated that it was true.
Her hand pressed a little harder against Damon’s back, feeling once again the almost stopped internal flow. The ice remained there, motionless and arrogant, as if mocking her from inside his body. Part of her wanted to scream. Another part wanted to keep trying until she fainted. The rational part knew Elizabeth was right. Her current state was already compromising her precision.
And without precision, she could kill him.
Elizabeth noticed her hesitation and continued before Ester could find the strength to resist again.
"Aria went to get Dragon Blood. Not a refined essence, not an alchemical extract, real blood. If we are lucky, because he is partially a vampire, perhaps he can absorb so characteristics before the body rejects it."
Ester let out a heavy sigh.
"If we are lucky."
"Yes."
"That phrase offends ."
"It offends too."
For a few seconds, the two remained silent. The sound of Damon’s weak breathing seed to fill the entire room. Outside, Morgana’s mansion remained alive with muffled movent: footsteps in the corridor, distant voices, doors opening and closing. But inside, everything remained bound to a single slow rhythm. Inhale. Pause. Exhale. Pause.
Ester looked back at Damon.
"I can’t leave."
Elizabeth closed her eyes for a second.
"Ester."
"If I leave, he will die."
"You don’t know that."
"I feel it."
That was worse than any technical argunt.
Because Ester did not speak like soone making an assumption.
She spoke like soone holding a rope on the verge of snapping.
"He needs heat," she continued, more quietly. "Not just braziers. Not just blankets. A truly warm place. Heated stones, circulating air, perhaps a mineral bath, sothing that forces the body to rember it still belongs to the world of the living."
Elizabeth looked at Damon.
Then at the room.
Then back at Ester.
"Moving him in this state is dangerous."
"Leaving him here is dangerous too."
"Then we stabilize him first."
"That is what I have been trying to do for six days."
Elizabeth did not answer imdiately.
Because there was no simple answer.
The truth was that they were all improvising. Ester with technical knowledge, Elizabeth with resources and risk, Morgana with money and influence, Aria with outside searches. But improvisation was still improvisation, even when carried out by competent people. The difference was that now Damon’s life depended on it.
Elizabeth squeezed Ester’s shoulder lightly.
"He will not die."
Ester let out another humorless laugh.
"You say that because you want to believe it."
"No. I say it because I know Damon."
Ester finally looked at her properly.
Elizabeth kept her hand on her back, but her expression was now more serious, almost hard.
"He is resilient in an irritating way. He has survived things that should have split others in half. And more importantly, he is not just lying there waiting to die."
Ester remained motionless.
Elizabeth indicated Damon with her eyes.
"You said it yourself. Sothing still moves inside him. He is fighting for his life."
"He is fighting against his own body."
"Maybe. But he is still fighting."
That struck Ester in an unexpected way.
Because it was true.
She had been looking at this as a war between herself and the ice. As if Damon were rely the battlefield. But he was not. There was internal resistance. Small, weak, deep. Sothing inside him was still trying to push death away, even in a coma, even with his channels destroyed, even with his body too broken to respond.
Damon was still there.
Not completely.
But he was.
Ester lowered her face.
For a few seconds, her expression ca apart.
Not completely.
She was too proud for that.
But enough for Elizabeth to see the exhaustion.
The fear.
The guilt.
"I don’t know if I can save him," Ester murmured.
Elizabeth squeezed her shoulder a little more firmly.
"Then save the part you can right now. After that, we rest enough to think about the next step."
"You say it as if it were simple."
"It isn’t simple. I am only making it sound simple because, if I tell the full truth, Cherry will co in here and start suggesting absurd ideas involving fire, dragons, and motivational slaps."
Despite everything, Ester almost laughed.
Almost.
It was a small, broken sound, but it existed.
Elizabeth considered that a considerable victory.
"Five minutes," Ester said.
"One hour."
"Ten minutes."
"Forty."
"Elizabeth."
"Ester."
The two stared at each other in silence.
Damon breathed slowly between them.
Finally, Ester looked away first.
"Twenty minutes. And soone keeps touching him while I rest."
"I will."
"You don’t understand the glacial flow."
"I don’t need to understand. I only need to call you if he gets worse."
Ester seed to hate the reasonableness of that answer.
A lot.
But she could not refute it.
With almost painful care, she removed one hand from Damon’s back. The cold reacted imdiately, spreading small crystals across the sheet. Ester went rigid, ready to return to work, but Elizabeth caught her wrist before she surrendered to the impulse.
"Slowly," Elizabeth said. "He is still here."
Ester closed her eyes.
Breathed.
Then removed the second hand.
The room seed to grow colder.
But Damon kept breathing.
The difference was minimal.
Fragile.
But enough.
Ester remained seated for a few seconds, as if she no longer knew how to stand. Then Elizabeth helped her up, supporting part of her weight when her legs nearly failed. The ice specialist hated it. That was clear from her expression. But she did not complain, which proved just how exhausted she was.
Before leaving, Ester looked at Damon one last ti.
His white hair spread over the pillow.
His skin remained far too cold.
His spiritual veins were still frozen.
Nothing was resolved.
Nothing was safe.
Even so, he was breathing.
And for now, that was enough.
"If he gets worse, wake imdiately," Ester said, her voice low but sharp.
Elizabeth nodded.
"I promise."
Ester took a few seconds before accepting the answer.
Then she allowed Elizabeth to lead her to the door.
But before leaving, she looked back at Damon one more ti.
Her expression hardened.
Not with coldness.
With determination.
"You idiot," she murmured. "Don’t you dare die while I sleep."
Damon did not answer.
But for an instant, almost imperceptibly, the ice near the center of his back trembled.
Elizabeth saw it.
Ester saw it too.
Neither of them said anything.
Because it was still far too little for hope.
But it was movent.
And movent, in that frozen body, ant the fight was not over yet.
Reviews
All reviews (0)