Page 28 of A Monarch's Fall

“We’ll find her. I promise,” he reassured Selene.

Selene nodded, her head falling back, and the room became silent.

“Is she alive?” Sasha asked worriedly beside me.

“Yes, my love, we can hear her heart,” I explained.

“Now we have to make sure that her heart keeps beating,” Efstratios said, “Venom poisoning, while usually not fatal, can be, if the paralysis extends to the vital organs such as the heart.”

Chapter seven

A New World.

Percy Flores

Light filtered through my eyelids, pink and bright. My body ached in familiar and unfamiliar ways. All my muscles felt stiff, like I wasn’t made of flesh but something cold and inorganic. My fingertips brushed against soft fabric, and I attempted to open my eyes, which felt glued closed with a year's worth of sleep.

Through my eyelashes, the world slowly took focus.

A window was opposite the bed I lay on, and the curtains drawn back allowed morning light to flood the room. Bare walls, whitewashed, a wooden closet off to the side that I could see.

I pushed myself up and fell back down. Every part of me protested at the movement. My head pounded, my pulse loud and harsh at my temples, a throbbing at the base of my skull. I took a deep breath and attempted to push myself into a sitting position again, this time with more success.

The bedroom was large and spacious, with minimal furniture, only the wardrobe and bed. The only door in the room was to my right.

My right leg ached, a dull, deep kind of pain. Pushing the tan-coloured bedding off of me revealed that I wore a plain, pale yellow nightgown. While I would ordinarily be concerned that someone had undressed and dressed me, my attention was occupied by the strange, clunky, boot-like structure encasing my lower right leg and foot. I racked my brain to try to remember Dr. Phears' lessons. It was some type of cast, but not fibreglass and plaster; a supporting boot, maybe? It had straps. I thought about removing it, but then decided that was a bad idea. Wherever I was, I had received medical treatment. Gingerly, I pressed my fingers along the base of my skull and felt a few small stitches along tender flesh and a patch of shaved hair. Then I quickly checked to make sure I still had my necklace with the ring that Selene gave me on my birthday. I didn’t usually think about it, but I was relieved when I felt it against my chest.

I strained my hearing to try to hear anything outside the door.

Where was I?

I remembered the strange quiet of the maze, then pain and… Dylan. The self-proclaimed hero had come to rescue me and, as was becoming habit, made everything so much worse.

Ana!

She was here somewhere. I hoped.

I had been taken from Ardens. I was sure I wasn’t in Ardens anymore. There was no fireplace or any source of heating that I could see within the room. There was a slight chill to the air, but nothing as there had been in Sanguis or Ardens. I was further south. Much further. Part of me felt different, something was missing, like a noise in the background that had suddenly gone quiet and only now was I aware that it wasn’t playing anymore.

Our bond.

I couldn’t feel Selene.

Not at all.

I tried to connect to her. I envisioned her face perfectly, the sound of her voice, the feel of her hands at my waist, her lips at my throat.

The sensation was almost real, my imagination so vivid, but it was only my imagination. I knew instinctively that I was a great distance from my soul match and that distance felt like looking out across the sea with no land in sight, and nothing to guide me, just a blinding sun and white-blue all around. It felt like how I imagined dying of thirst might feel, but minus the physical sensation and entirely psychological.

I had to find out where I was. Gather as much information as I could and use everything I had at my disposal to reunite with Selene.

I felt a cold sort of dread wash over me as I twisted to get out of bed and flinched, expecting pain in my side, but finding none.

The pain I remembered wasn’t my own. It had been Selene’s, and there was something terrifying and dreadful about not being connected to her pain anymore. Did it mean she was no longer in pain? Was the bond affected by distance? Like a radio, were we simply too far apart to feel each other? Were her enchantments working now, no longer allowing our bond to leak through? Or did the lack of shared pain mean something worse, far worse? I couldn’t bring myself to even think the words.

No.

It was only anxiety for my soul match, causing my thoughts to spiral. We couldn’t exist alone. We were one now. If I were here in this life, so was Selene, somewhere.