I emerged from my Nave feeling like someone had fed me through a meat grinder, reassembled the pieces wrong, and then asked me to run a marathon.
Every muscle in my body screamed. Not the dull ache of normal exercise — this was a full-bodied symphony of suffering, each fiber playing its own unique note of agony. My legs felt like they'd been replaced with columns of wet sand. My arms hung at my sides like dead weight, fingers tingling with the memory of marble floor dragged across inch by agonizing inch.
'Thirty-five years of training. That's what she said.'
If every session was like this, I wouldn't last thirty-five days.
The deck of the ship swam back into focus around me. The same organized chaos as before — workers carrying cargo, Derry shouting orders, the smell of tar and salt and timber. Except now everything seemed too bright, too loud, too much. My eyes watered against the afternoon sun like it had personally offended me.
