Darkness felt like a weighted blanket.
It pressed on her chest like a second skin thick, unmoving until even breathing felt like an intrusion.
When Sylvia opened her eyes, the ceiling was gone.
No light. No room. No world.
Only the echo of her own pulse.
A slow, dragging sound followed chains being pulled through mud.
She tried to move, but her limbs refused her. It was as if something inside her had turned to glass.
Her mark throbbed once beneath her wrist faint, cold, not the violent burn of before, but a whisper, a reminder.
And then came the sound.
The scream.
Not hers.
Metal. Bone. Laughter cut short.
It poured through her mind in broken flashes white light, wet floors, voices calling her subject, not Sylvia.
A hand pressing against her throat.
A needle sliding beneath her skin.
The promise that she would never die only endure.
She sat up suddenly, gasping.
The room was back.
The small window. The pale morning light. The blanket twisted around her legs.
Her chest ached. But she was alive.
She is home, she reminded herself. Alive.
The silence felt wrong now.
Every corner of the room pulsed with what she refused to remember.
The day after she'd escaped, she'd walked like nothing occurred telling herself she was fine. That the pain had stayed behind with the ruins of that place. She felt nothing just numbness.No pain, suffering
That she'd buried it.
But in reality trauma doesn't stay buried.
It waits. Patient. Smiling.
Her hands trembled as she reached for the glass of water beside the bed.
It spilled before she touched it, crashing against the floor.
The sound cracked something open inside her.
Flashes the hallway where she led to , her own reflection in a blood-streaked mirror, the mark pulsing like a heartbeat that wasn't hers.
Then that cold, clinical voice:
"Pain is necessary for revelation."
She pressed her palms against her ears.
"No. No more."
But it came anyway the nightmare folding into memory until she couldn't tell which was which.
In the vision, she saw him Ashael bound, bleeding, his chains the same as hers once were.
And for a heartbeat, she couldn't tell whose pain she was feeling.
Was it his?
Or hers buried so deep that it no longer screamed, only echoed?
Sylvia clutched her knees to her chest, shaking.
She couldn't breathe anymore
I'm fine.
That's what she said. To Reav. To Emrys. To herself.
The perfect lie of survival.
Because if she said it enough, maybe it would become true.
But her soul was splintering quietly beneath the words.
And somewhere deep in that darkness, the wolf stirred not wild this time, but mourning.
You cannot overcome what you refuse to feel.
The voice wasn't Ashael's. Not the wolf's either.
It was her own older, buried under the rubble of what they'd made her forget.
It terrified her more than any dream.
Her eyes burned.
She tried to breathe.
But even air felt wrong.
Then, faintly, moonlight slipped through the curtains.
It touched the edge of her wrist, glinting off the mark.
For an instant, she saw it pulse back softer now, almost human.
As if it knew she was breaking.
And approved.
Sylvia laughed, a sound caught between a sob and surrender.
Her reflection in the spilled water stared back eyes ringed glacier blue, hollow but alive.
"Fine," she whispered to it. "If you want me to remember, then I will."
The air shifted — cool, clean, merciless.
And for the first time since escaping, she didn't feel safe.
She felt awake.