Cold.
That was the first thing Ari felt when consciousness returned - not pain, not relief, just cold seeping into her bones like water through cracked stone.
Her eyes opened slowly, reluctantly. Orange firelight danced across rough stone walls, casting shadows that writhed and twisted. Wood crackled and popped nearby, sending small sparks spiraling upward into darkness. The sound was almost peaceful - the kind of sound that belonged to camping trips and family gatherings, not to whatever nightmare she'd just escaped.
For one blissful second, she didn't remember.
Then it hit - the fire, the screaming, the ceiling collapsing, the bodies -
Her stomach lurched violently. She barely managed to turn her head before vomiting onto the stone floor beside her. Nothing came up but bile and ash, burning her throat like liquid fire, choking her. Her body heaved again and again, each spasm wracking her torso with sharp pain. She gasped for air between convulsions, tears streaming down her face, mixing with the sweat and grime that coated her skin.
I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to.
The words repeated in her mind like a mantra.
Her hand grasped desperately at something covering her, pulling it over her head, hiding her face from the firelight and whatever lay beyond it. Wrapped in darkness, cocooned in fabric that smelled of earth and sweat and something indefinably safe, Ari's sobs finally quieted to trembling silence.
After several minutes - or perhaps hours, time had lost all meaning - her hand emerged from beneath the covering. Her fingers traced the material slowly, exploring its texture with the careful attention of someone trying to anchor themselves to reality through physical sensation. Fabric with a short nap, rough wool or perhaps treated leather. Her hand parted the material slightly, and her head followed, peeking out like a frightened animal emerging from its burrow.
A cloak. Black, or what had once been black before being stained with mud and blood and gods knew what else. It reeked of filth and sweat, which somehow made it more real, more solid than anything else in this strange half-dream.
Not mine, she thought distantly. Someone else's.
Ari tried to push herself upright, but another coughing fit seized her before she could manage more than lifting her shoulders. The coughing turned into dry heaving, her abused stomach trying to expel contents that no longer existed. She collapsed back onto whatever she was lying on - something soft, woven, a mat of some kind - gasping and shaking.
She wiped her mouth on the cloak without thinking. It couldn't possibly get any filthier than it already was.
On her third attempt, Ari managed to sit up, though the effort left her dizzy and breathless. She clutched the cloak around her shoulders and looked around properly for the first time.
A cave. She was in a cave.
The realization came with surprising calm, as though her mind had already exhausted its capacity for shock. The space was roughly circular, perhaps twenty feet across, with a low ceiling that trapped smoke near the top and let it drift slowly toward an opening she could barely make out in the dim light. The walls were rough stone, wet in places where water seeped through cracks, creating a constant soft pattering sound that echoed strangely in the enclosed space. The air was damp and smelled of rock and earth and wood smoke.
Near her lay a loose bag, its contents spilled partially across the floor - a knife, some rope, a waterskin. And between her and the cave entrance stood a barrier of smooth stone, walls that rose from the floor in an unnaturally straight line, leaving only a narrow opening. The construction was too perfect, too deliberate to be natural.
From that narrow entrance, daylight filtered in - weak, gray, suggesting either dawn or dusk. The light created a person-shaped shadow that moved, shifted, and then resolved into actual form as a small figure stepped into the cave.
Liriel.
The child stood silhouetted in the entrance for a moment, clutching something to her chest - her teddy bear, Ari realized, the one she'd been holding when the ceiling fell. When Liriel saw Ari sitting up, saw her conscious and breathing and alive, something in the child's face crumpled with relief.
"Ari! Ari!"
Liriel ran forward and launched herself at Ari with the heedless enthusiasm of a child who'd forgotten, for just a moment, that the person she was tackling might be injured.
Ari hissed with pain as the impact knocked her backward, Liriel's small body colliding with her ribs and shoulders and about six different places that screamed in protest. They tumbled together onto the mat, Liriel clinging tight enough to hurt, and Ari could only wrap her arms around the child and try not to cry out.
"I was worried you wouldn't wake up!" Liriel's voice was muffled against Ari's chest, thick with tears. "You were sleeping and sleeping and I tried to wake you but the man said not to and I was so scared - "
"I'm sorry, Liriel." Ari's voice came out low and rough, barely recognizable as her own. She stroked the child's hair with trembling fingers. "I'm sorry for making you worry."
They stayed like that for a long moment - Liriel sobbing against Ari's chest, Ari holding her and staring at nothing, feeling the weight of responsibility settle onto shoulders that felt far too fragile to bear it. She'd kept this child alive. Somehow, impossibly, they'd both survived.
When Liriel's sobs finally quieted to hiccupping breaths, Ari found her voice again. "What happened? Where are we?"
Liriel pulled back, wiping her nose on her sleeve - a gesture so childishly normal it made Ari's throat tighten. "I don't know exactly. But the man said he'd walk us home."
"A man?" Ari's surprise triggered another coughing fit. She doubled over, wheezing.
"A scary man." Liriel's eyes went wide as she described him, making exaggerated gestures with her hands to show his size and fierceness. "Really tall and strong and he doesn't smile at all. But..." She paused, seeming to consider. "I think he's good-hearted. He saved us. And he gave me water and told me you'd be okay."
"Did he tell you his name?"
Liriel shook her head, her expression shifting to something like frustration. "I asked him lots of times but he just ignored me. He said he'd be back later with food." Then, as if remembering something important, she jumped up and ran back toward the entrance.
Ari watched her go, then looked down at herself properly for the first time.
Her clothes were destroyed. The elegant dress she'd worn to meet Kreaton was torn and scorched beyond recognition. Large sections were simply gone, burned away or ripped off. What remained was black with soot and stiff with dried blood. Her shoes were missing entirely. Her legs and arms were wrapped in rough bandages, the kind someone had made quickly from torn cloth, more functional than careful.
"The man patched you up!" Liriel called from the entrance. She came bounding back with something clutched in her hands - a crown of woven flowers, already starting to wilt. "But I helped too! I brought water from the stream outside." She placed the flower crown on Ari's head with great ceremony, her face lighting up. "Pretty, right? I made this today while you were sleeping."
Ari smiled despite everything - or tried to. The expression felt wrong on her face, artificial, a mask stretched over something broken. But she made the effort for Liriel's sake. "It's beautiful. Thank you."
The child beamed, then settled beside her, chattering about the flowers she'd found, the stream, the strange birds outside, filling the silence with sound that kept darker thoughts at bay.
Ari let her talk while examining her own body with growing concern. When she tried to shift her legs, pain lanced through her calves and thighs - not the sharp pain of broken bones but the deep, grinding ache of badly bruised muscle and possibly worse.
"Liriel," she interrupted the child's story about a butterfly. "I need to... can you help me stand?"
"Of course!" Liriel sprang up, offering her shoulder with the earnest determination of someone who wanted desperately to be useful.
Ari grasped the child's shoulder and tried to lever herself upward. She managed to get her feet under her, managed to put weight on her legs -
And collapsed immediately, crying out as her legs simply refused to support her weight. She hit the mat hard, jarring her ribs, and the impact drove the air from her lungs. For a moment she could only lie there, gasping like a landed fish.
"I can't." Tears started flowing before she could stop them, hot and shameful. "I can't walk. I can't - "
"It's okay!" Liriel's voice was high with distress, the child clearly uncertain how to handle seeing an adult break down. "You just need to rest more! The man will be back and he'll - he'll figure something out!"
But Ari barely heard her. She curled onto her side, pulling her legs up despite the pain, and buried her face in the cloak. "My legs," she whispered. "They hurt so much. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to - "
She couldn't finish. Couldn't articulate the full weight of her helplessness. She'd survived the fire, survived the collapse, only to be trapped in her own useless body.
"Rest, Ari." Liriel's small hand patted her shoulder through the cloak. "Just rest. It'll be okay."
The child's attempt at comfort only made it worse. Ari pulled the cloak over her head again, retreating into darkness, and let herself sob as quietly as she could manage. She didn't want Liriel to hear. Didn't want to frighten her more than the child had already been frightened.
But her body shook with each suppressed cry, and she couldn't stop the tears that soaked into the rough fabric of the cloak.
Behind her, Liriel sat down with her back pressed against Ari's, offering what comfort she could through simple presence. The child said nothing more, just stayed close, a small warm weight that said you're not alone.
Time passed. The fire crackled. Water dripped somewhere in the depths of the cave. And Ari lay curled beneath a stranger's cloak, trying to remember how to be human.
The nausea came without warning - a sudden churning in her stomach, a rush of saliva, that terrible moment of knowing what was coming and being unable to stop it. Ari threw the cloak aside and rolled toward the edge of her mat, retching.
Nothing came up but thin, bitter bile. Her stomach contracted violently around emptiness, each spasm more painful than the last. She gasped and heaved and coughed until her ribs screamed and her throat felt raw as an open wound.
When it finally stopped, she remained on her hands and knees, trembling, too weak to move back to the mat.
Liriel's hand rubbed small circles on her back. "Should I get water?"
Ari nodded, unable to speak.
The child scurried away and returned with the waterskin, helping Ari take small sips that she fought to keep down. The water was cold and tasted faintly of minerals - stream water, natural and clean. It helped, marginally.
"Thank you," Ari managed.
She crawled back to the mat and pulled the cloak over herself once more. The pattern was establishing itself: lie down, try to rest, try to close her eyes -
The moment her eyelids closed, the fire was waiting.
Not the campfire's gentle warmth, but the inferno. The Citadel burning, walls collapsing, people screaming. The man on fire running down the hallway, his skin melting, his screams -
Ari's eyes snapped open, her heart hammering.
Don't close your eyes. Don't close your eyes. If you close your eyes you'll see them.
She stared at the cave ceiling instead, at the rough stone and the smoke gathered near the top, at anything that was real and present and not a memory of horror.
But exhaustion pulled at her. Her body demanded sleep even as her mind recoiled from it. Her eyelids grew heavy despite her best efforts...
The woman reaching for help. Please don't leave me.
The children under the tapestry, so small, so still.
The explosion, the ceiling fracturing, stone falling -
Ari jerked awake with a gasp.
How long had she been asleep? Seconds? Minutes? Not long enough for her body to recover, too long for her mind to endure.
She tried again.
Closed her eyes.
Fire. Screaming. Death.
Opened them.
The pattern repeated.
Again.
And again.
And again.
By the time the light filtering through the entrance had shifted from gray to gold, Ari had given up on sleep entirely. She lay on her back, eyes wide open, the flower crown Liriel had made sliding sideways on her head as she stared at nothing.
Liriel, blessedly, had fallen asleep beside her, exhausted by her own worry and relief. The child's breathing was soft and even, occasionally hitching with the aftermath of tears. Even in sleep, she clutched her teddy bear tight.
Ari envied her that simple escape.
The cave was quiet except for the crackling fire, the dripping water, and Liriel's breathing. Peaceful, almost. If Ari could just stop thinking, stop remembering, it might even be pleasant.
But her mind wouldn't quiet.
Why did I survive?
The question circled endlessly, a vulture over carrion.
Why me? Why Liriel? Why not the others?
The woman who'd reached for help - had she had a family? Children? Someone who loved her and would never know what happened?
The guards who'd died at their posts, trying to protect people who burned anyway.
Mariselle - was she alive? Dead? Trapped somewhere, calling for help that would never come?
Iselda. Frost. Samuel.
Please let them be alive. Please.
But prayers felt hollow when you were lying in a cave wearing someone else's blood and couldn't even stand on your own legs.
Ari's stomach twisted again, but this time it was just nausea without the vomiting - her body had nothing left to expel. She curled onto her side, careful not to disturb Liriel, and pulled the cloak tighter.
The fabric smelled like earth and rain and wood smoke. Like safety, somehow, though that made no sense. It was just cloth. Just a piece of someone's belongings that they'd draped over her while she was unconscious.
But wrapped in it, she felt... less exposed. Less breakable.
She closed her eyes experimentally.
Fire. Death. Screaming.
Opened them.
I can't do this. I can't keep living like this.
But what choice did she have?
Ari lay there in the golden afternoon light, unable to sleep, unable to stand, unable to do anything but exist and remember and hurt.
The light from outside dimmed suddenly, blocked by something large. Ari's breath caught in her throat as a shadow filled the entrance - human-shaped, broad-shouldered, backlit by the setting sun so that she couldn't make out any features.
For one terrible moment, her mind supplied monsters. Then the figure stepped inside, and the firelight revealed him.
A young man, perhaps her age or slightly older, moved into the cave with the silent, economical grace of someone who'd learned to take up as little space as possible. Dark hair fell across his face, unkempt and dusty, partially obscuring features that the flickering firelight rendered in sharp relief - high cheekbones, a strong jaw, eyes that were dark brown and deeply watchful.
His clothes were in worse shape than hers. Black shirt torn in multiple places, hanging loose on a frame that was muscular but lean - the build of someone who survived on activity rather than regular meals. His trousers were shredded at the knees, stained with mud and what might have been blood. He walked barefoot across the stone floor, and Ari noticed his feet were calloused and scarred, the feet of someone who often went without shoes.
In one hand, he carried a string of fish - four or five of them, still wet, probably freshly caught.
But it was his face that held her attention. Scars - not dramatic, not covering his whole face, but present. A thin white line across his left cheekbone. Another at his temple. The kind of marks left by violence survived. And his eyes - gods, his eyes - carried a weight she recognized because she saw it in mirrors now. The look of someone who'd seen things they couldn't unsee.
He stopped just inside the entrance, his gaze sweeping across the cave with practiced wariness. Taking inventory. Assessing threats. Finding none, his posture relaxed fractionally - though "relaxed" seemed a relative term. He still looked ready to move, to fight, to run.
Then his eyes landed on her.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved.
Ari's mind struggled to reconcile the image before her with the memory burned into her soul - the temple, the attackers, the pillars of stone erupting from the floor. The strong arm that had caught her mid-fall, the figure in the black cloak who'd thrown her through a window to safety, who'd moved earth itself with gestures she'd spent weeks trying to understand.
Him.
Her savior. Her rescuer. The man who'd haunted her thoughts, who she'd searched for, who she'd built into something almost mythical in her mind.
He looked... different. Smaller somehow, though he was objectively tall. More human. The heroic figure of her memory had been cloaked in shadow and urgency, moving with supernatural speed and power. This was just a tired, scarred young man holding fish and trying not to drip water on the cave floor.
Yet something in the way he moved - economical, precise, nothing wasted - confirmed her suspicion. The way he assessed the cave. The way his eyes calculated distances and exits even in this moment of apparent safety.
"You," Ari whispered, her voice barely audible.
He said nothing. Just stood there, watching her with those careful, unreadable eyes that gave away absolutely nothing.
Her heart hammered. Part of her wanted to cry with relief - found him, finally found him - and part of her felt a strange disappointment she couldn't name. This silent, scarred stranger didn't match the hero she'd constructed in her mind.
The moment stretched between them, heavy with unspoken recognition on her side and unreadable calculation on his.
Then he moved.
Without a word, without acknowledging her whisper, he walked past her, his bare feet silent on the stone. He stopped near where she'd been sick, looking down at the mess she'd made - bile and stomach acid pooled on the cave floor, already starting to dry at the edges.
Ari felt her face flush with shame.
She felt rather than saw what happened next. A faint vibration through the stone floor, so subtle it was almost imperceptible. The rock beneath her shifted slightly, and the area where she'd been sick simply... changed.
The soiled stone turned to fine gravel, then that gravel sank down as if being pulled into the earth. New sand rose up to replace it, relatively clean, covering the mess completely. The whole process took perhaps five seconds and was utterly silent except for the soft hiss of moving earth.
Ari stared. She'd seen True Magic before - Professor Maius had demonstrated it - but never this casually, this efficiently, for something as mundane as cleaning up vomit.
The man paid no attention to her reaction. He simply continued past, moving to where his bag lay against the wall. He set down the string of fish and retrieved a small knife from the bag - just a simple utility blade, worn but well-maintained.
Then he sat by the fire, his back to her, and began preparing the fish in complete silence.
Ari watched, transfixed despite herself, as he worked.
His movements were practiced, efficient. He held each fish with one hand and used the knife to make a precise cut along the belly. Then - and this part made her slightly queasy despite having an empty stomach - he hooked his finger inside and removed all the innards with one swift, smooth motion. Organs and blood slid out cleanly, and he set them aside in a small pile.
He repeated the process with each fish. Cut, scoop, set aside. This was clearly something he'd done hundreds of times.
When he'd finished with the last fish, he wiped the knife on his already-filthy trousers, set it aside, and gathered up the fish entrails. He stood and walked outside without a word, presumably to dispose of them away from the cave.
Ari used his absence to check on Liriel. The child was still asleep, curled on her side, breathing softly. Ari pulled the cloak over both of them, creating a shared warmth.
When the man returned, he carried several thin branches, already stripped of bark and sharpened to points. He moved to the fire and began skewering the fish, threading each one carefully onto a stick. Then he set them up around the fire, positioning them at angles to catch the heat without being directly in the flames.
The smell of cooking fish began to fill the cave - savory, rich, making Ari's stomach cramp with hunger even as the thought of eating made her want to retch again.
She turned to face him properly, gathering what remained of her courage. Liriel stirred at the movement but didn't wake, just shifted closer to Ari's warmth.
"Thank you." Her voice came out hoarse, barely above a whisper. "For saving us. Both of us. I don't know how to repay - "
"Don't." He didn't look up from adjusting one of the fish sticks. His voice was low, rough, the voice of someone who didn't speak often. "You don't owe me anything."
"But - "
"You needed help. I helped. That's it."
The finality in his tone made further gratitude feel unwelcome, almost insulting. As if by thanking him, she was making it into something more than it was - a transaction, an obligation, when he clearly wanted it to be neither.
Ari bit her lip, frustration warring with exhaustion. She watched him work for several long minutes, the silence broken only by the crackling fire and the soft sizzle of fish beginning to cook.
Finally, she tried a different approach. "I... I haven't introduced myself properly." She paused, unsure how much to reveal. Standard etiquette would have her announce her full title, her mother's position, her place in the Theocracy's hierarchy. But something told her that approach would fail here. "I'm Arianna. Ari."
He said nothing. Didn't even glance up.
"From Kar-Ah," she continued, feeling foolish but unable to stop. "In the Theocracy."
Still nothing. He rotated one of the fish sticks slightly, checking its progress with the focus of someone who found the task infinitely more interesting than conversation.
"You could at least tell me your na- " she said, unable to keep a note of irritation from creeping into her voice.
But another wave of nausea cut her off. She pressed a hand to her stomach, breathing carefully through her nose until it passed.
When she looked up again, he was watching her with an expression that might have been concern if it showed any emotion at all. It was hard to tell.
"You need to eat," he said simply.
"I can't. Everything just comes back up."
"Then you'll keep throwing up nothing until your body gives out entirely." He reached over and lifted one of the fish from the fire, testing its doneness with his fingers despite the heat. Apparently satisfied, he pulled it free and stuck the pointed end of the stick into the ground near Ari's mat, leaving the cooked fish within easy reach. "Force it down. Your body needs something to work with."
Ari stared at the fish. It actually looked good - the skin crispy and golden, the flesh flaking nicely. Her stomach rumbled and twisted simultaneously, unable to decide between hunger and nausea.
"I'm not hungry," she said, turning her back to the fire, to him, to the offered food.
"Lying to yourself doesn't change reality."
"I'll just throw it up."
"Maybe. Maybe not. But you definitely won't keep down the food you don't eat." There was something almost like humor in his tone, though his expression remained neutral. "Eat it or don't. But don't complain about feeling terrible when you're choosing to stay weak."
The words stung because they were true. Ari pulled the cloak tighter around her shoulders and didn't respond.
Behind her, she heard him sigh - a soft, tired sound that made him seem suddenly even more human.
"We're moving to Valkrath tomorrow morning," he said, and his voice was quieter now, less harsh. "If you can't stand by then..."
Ari tensed, waiting for the threat, the ultimatum, the thing that would confirm he wasn't the hero she'd imagined.
"I'll leave you here."
She turned to look at him, shock cutting through her exhaustion. "You'd abandon us?"
He met her eyes directly, and there was something in his gaze - not cruelty, but a kind of harsh pragmatism that refused to soften the world's edges.
"And if I can't walk by tomorrow?"
"Then you'd better hope someone comes looking." He turned back to the fire, checking the other fish. "But it'd be easier - on both of us - if you just try to be strong."