Jervis' voice. 'Bastard got distracted. Got him with a chair,' the man said, from that other world. 'He won't be going anywhere for a while. Boy - boy, did he mark you?'
It was becoming very hard to breathe; his frantic gasps after air just made the pain worse, and didn't seem to be bringing anything into his lungs.
Someone rolled him onto his back and he cried out.
'Lady's tits!' Jervis swore. 'Bloody bastard!'
Vanyel opened his eyes, but he couldn't see anything but a tiny spot of brightness in a sea of black. The blackness called him -
Jervis slapped his face lightly, and the blackness receded for a moment.
Vanyel did his best to obey, as Jervis bellowed somewhere over his head for a Healer, but he was cold, and getting colder, and there didn't seem to be any room for anything but agony.
He tried to open his eyes again, when he heard frantically running feet. There was a strange Herald in Whites on his left, and a swirl of green robes as a Healer dropped down beside him on his right.
'Gods!' he heard the latter swear, in an audible panic. There were hands pulling his away, and a wash of weakening that followed a gush of something, warmth that poured out of him, and over the hands that replaced his. 'I - oh, gods, we're losing him!'
'Like hell!' ''I - '
Everything - voices, vision, even the pain - began to fade. Everything except the stranger kneeling at his left side. Though his face remained oddly shadowed, there was a soft, argent glow about him, like starlight, that brightened with each passing moment.
Vanyel blinked, struggled against his fading sight, tried to hold to consciousness.
The urgency in the request pulled at him; this was important. Important that he fight past the pain to obey the stranger. Moved by some deep conviction that he didn't understand, he found a tiny crumb of strength; just enough to move the fingers of his left hand and place them, sticky and warm with his own blood, into the stranger's outstretched palm. The stranger's hand closed over his, and his lips curved in a smile of triumph.
He was standing. The pain was gone.
So was the wound. The strange Herald still held his hand, but about them was - nothing. Only a kind of peaceful, tranquil gray emptiness.
The stranger's face was still shadowed - except for the eyes, a blazing glory of sapphires and light, a light never seen in Vanyel's world.
Not in the mortal world that Vanyel knew.
Therefore this was not the natural world - and this was no mere Herald.
Vanyel released the stranger's hand and sank slowly to one knee, unable to look away from those incandescent eyes. Then the stranger smiled, and the smile was as brilliant and overpowering as the gaze. That smile was no sight for mortal eyes, and Vanyel managed to drop his gaze before he was lost to it. He bowed his head over his knee in profound obeisance to the Power that had chosen to wear the guise of a human, and a Herald.
'Lord,' he whispered, unable to muster enough coherent thought to say anything more.
'Vanyel, no,' replied a voice of amber, silk, and steel.
He felt hands, gentle hands on his shoulders, hands that drew him up to his feet. He dared a glance at the Power's face, and was caught again, a moth in sapphirine flame.
'No, Vanyel,' He said, shaking His head, denying Vanyel's assumption. 'Not 'Lord.' Only a messenger, a servant. You mustn't kneel to me.''
