Vaedros stands before me in one future, his blade buried in my chest, his expression calm, resolved, untouched by regret as my blood spreads across his hands.
In the next, he is dragging me to my feet, one arm around me, his voice sharp with urgency as something behind us collapses, shielding me with his body as debris falls.
Then again, his hands choking me.
Then again, his hand pulling me back from the edge of a drop I never saw.
Again.
Again.
Again.
The visions do not sequence.
They do not separate.
They overlap so violently that I cannot tell which comes first, which follows, which replaces which. His face becomes a constant through all of them, shifting between savior and executioner so quickly that the distinction begins to lose meaning.
Pain detonates behind my eyes. I stagger. Reality tries to reassert itself, but the visions refuse to release me cleanly this time. They cling, smear across the present, bleeding into what I can see and hear until the forest itself feels uncertain, unstable, wrong like it goes beyond the usual distortions.
And beneath it all…Something else. A presence. A pressure that is not part of the forest, that does not move like the shifting patterns I have learned to navigate, that instead pushes, presses, directs, as though the visions are no longer simply unfolding but being guided toward something I cannot yet understand.
Vaedros is saying something. I hear his voice. I do not understand the words. The ground shifts again, or I do, and then I am falling.
I do not hit it.
His hands catch me before the impact, one at my back, the other bracing my shoulder, steadying me with a force that feels almost too solid against the instability tearing through me. I try to pull away, something sharp and panicked rising through the haze.
“Don’t—”
The word breaks apart before it finishes.
“You’re not standing,” he says, and there is no patience in it now, no measured tone, only something firm and unyielding that cuts through the chaos in a way nothing else can.
“I can?—”
I cannot. The attempt to prove it ends with the world tilting violently to one side, my vision darkening at the edges until everything narrows into fragments of light and shadow that refuse to hold still.
His arm tightens around me. Then I am lifted.
The shift is sudden enough that I cannot even process it, the ground dropping away entirely as he pulls me against him with no regard for protest, one arm beneath my knees, the other at my back, holding me with absolute certainty.
“No,” I manage, the word weaker than I intend, my hand pushing uselessly against his shoulder. “Put me down.”
“No.”
Flat and final.
I try again, because resistance is instinct, because control is the only thing that has kept me functional this long, because letting him do this feels dangerously close to something I cannot afford.
“I’m fine?—”
“You’re barely conscious,” he cuts in, moving already, steps steady, unhesitating despite the terrain. “Save the argument for when you can stand without collapsing.”
I try to push against him again, and this time the motion sends another wave of dizziness crashing through me so violently that my fingers lose strength halfway through the attempt. The world flickers. My head drops forward.
His grip shifts. Tighter. More secure.