Elias woke to nausea instead of sunlight.
It came in fast waves, sharp, sour, and deeply unfair to someone who had once taken pride in his iron stomach.
He barely managed to roll out of bed before the next one hit, the sound of his feet against the floorboards drowned out by the low groan he tried, and failed, to stifle.
He'd known this would happen. It began the other day, after breakfast, right after smelling the honey Robert had bought and the others claimed that his reaction was "perfectly natural."
Perfectly natural, yes. Also perfectly traitorous. He hadn't expected to be wake up by the sickness.
"Unbelievable," he muttered under his breath as he stumbled into the bathroom, one hand on the wall. "I warned him about divine chemistry, and now look at me. I'm incubating a star… or indigestion. Hard to tell."
He sank to his knees beside the basin, closing his eyes and breathing through his nose until the worst passed. The world stopped spinning, but his irritation didn't.
