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There, they stayed for days as she nursed him through the worst of his hellscape. She laid blankets over him and tried to feed him with soup and noodles, but his body, burning from the inside, rejected it all.

The detox was brutal - his body shook with chills, his fever spiked, and he lost fluids through all his orifices. He lost consciousness several times and barely registered her presence, so lost was he to the pain and agony seeping out of him.

Finally, his body won the battle over the drug-laced venom inside him, and he fell into a deep sleep.

When he woke, he found a carafe of vegetable and rehydrated protein soup, dry day-old bread, and warm clothes in a pile. He ate what she’d provided, wondering where she’d gone.

He had no name for her, just a face. One he would never forget, for it had been burned into his psyche throughout his nightmares.

She had become the only beam of hope that had urged him from the brink of death and defeat.

He had etched her into his soul, from the soft, long feathers that grew from the nape of her neck under her silver, metallic river of hair to her lilac eyes.

His mind’s eye bucket load the sweet, soft pink lips, the high cheekbones, and the unusual freckles across her alabaster skin.

Her brows, too, were burnished, and he wondered whether she had been a victim of the silver death whose addicts were characterized by their hair turning chrome.

Nada.She was not a koko addict. She was too pure, too ethereal for that shit.

Where she came from was a mystery. She also muttered in her sleep in a language he’d never heard before.

She had to be from another world he was unfamiliar with.

What intrigued him most about her was what lay above those stunning purple beams of light - a stone embedded in the centre of her temple.

It seemed a precious jewel that glowed with a spectrum of colors.

She kept it hidden under the fall of her bangs and a wrap.

He only glimpsed it one morning when she had leaned over him during a fever so furious he’d screamed out.

She’d rushed to him, and her head covering had slipped, revealing her gemstone.

When his fevered eyes set on it, he felt a hit, a pure jolt of energy from it that washed over him with such love and feeling that he gasped, and somehow, his fever eased.

He’d wondered what it was and who she was, but he had no answers.

He only knew he wanted to see her again and thank her for saving his life.

So he stayed in her hovel, feeling more robust and full of life by the hour until she returned.

He heard the sound of the shack entrance sliding open.

Her presence followed, lighting up the room.

Fokk, she was beautiful.

Her eyes widened in delight at seeing him sitting up in bed.

They lit up like an open sky studded with a million jagged diamonds, too many to count, in a wash of lilac shades too beautiful to name.

She clapped her hands together, her face suffused with joy. ‘You’re better.’

She sounded so happy he couldn’t help but smile at her.

Apart from his Sable brothers and his Eden Guard instructors, no one else across Pegasi had ever cared whether he lived or died before.

She darted to his side, her hair falling in a silver river to her waist. He’d never seen anything like it.