“T-Talo—”
The pressure splintered into heat so sudden and violent that my spine arched off the ground. It flooded through me in erratic waves, scalding and then vanishing just long enough to make me think it had ended before slamming back in with twice the ferocity.
My abdomen clenched so sharply that my muscles locked, forcing my knees into the damp grass as I folded forward, my palms digging into the earth in a useless attempt to ground myself.
The stars above blurred, their steady glow warping into streaks of silver light as though the sky itself had begun to tilt.
Something was wrong.
Cold followed the heat, slithering through my veins and hollowing me from the inside out. My teeth knocked together despite the warmth of the night.
My hands flew to my chest, fingers pressing hard against my sternum as though I could physically contain whatever was unraveling beneath it.
Talon caught me before I could collapse fully.
One arm wrapped around my back and hauled me upright against him gently. His other hand came to my face, thumb pressing beneath my chin to lift it.
“Kaelia,” he said, and my name sounded different in his mouth now. Distant. “Stay with me.”
I tried to answer him, but the pain surged again, stronger this time, radiating from my chest down through my ribs and into my stomach in a merciless spiral that made my vision pulse at the edges.
The grass beneath me felt distant. His hands felt distant. Even my own body felt as though it no longer belonged entirely to me.
My fingers twisted into the fabric of his shirt. I did not know whether I was holding on to him or bracing against the next wave.
He shifted behind me, pulling me fully against his chest, one hand splayed flat over my sternum now.
The night around us had gone unnaturally still.
No wind moved through the trees. No distant laughter drifted from the city. Even the insects seemed to have quieted.
My lashes lifted and fell heavily, the night sky above me dissolving into blurred streaks of silver and black. The stars refused to hold their shape. They bled into one another, trembling at the edges as though the heavens themselves had begun to melt.
“Kaelia.”
His voice reached me from somewhere impossibly far away, threaded with a strain I had never heard from him before. Fingers brushed against my cheek, firm and insistent.
“Stay with me.”
I tried.
I truly tried.
But the world would not steady.
The pressure in my chest no longer tore through me in violent waves. Instead it drew inward, tightening slowly, until it felt less like an explosion and more like something being pulled taut inside my ribcage.
The stars above flickered once more.
Then they shattered.
The sensation of falling came with the abrupt and nauseating awareness that the ground beneath me was no longer grass, that the air against my skin had shifted temperature, that something colder had swallowed the warmth of his body.
A crash of water erupted around me and my eyes flew open as liquid surged over my lips and into my nose. I choked, instinct taking over as my body lurched upward, coughing violently while bathwater sloshed over the porcelain edge and onto the tiled floor.
My vision steadied enough for the world to assemble itself piece by piece. Pale marble walls. The gilded edge of the bathing pool. Steam curling faintly from water that had begun to cool against my skin.
I was sitting upright in my bath.