Hunger slammed into me with another sensation.
I had a stomach. I had muscles. I had an appetite that’d been denied for so fucking long.
The ice vanished on my tongue, melting into a non-distinguishable temperature.
I mourned it instantly.
I had nothing to break the monotony. Nothing to rip off my blindfold or pull out my gag or unplug my ears. I was empty without noise and sight and her. Empty and cornered, being pulled down into the blackness.
Things hissed and slithered. Nightmares rolled in. Numbness resettled over my awareness.
No!
Christ, no.
I wouldn’t survive if I slipped again.
That dungeon was my coffin. A coffin that would slam shut with a padlock that would never reopen. If I let the evil have me, I would never see Eleanor again, never talk to her, kiss her, look at her.
NO!
I went berserk.
I did my best.
I enlisted every weak skill and broken power to wake up.
Wake up.
WAKE UP!
Something cackled in my mind. The blackness thickened. And I—
Ice on my lip.
Oh, thank God.
It interrupted the suction; it gave me vividness to cling to. A violent tear in the never-ending ether.
I crawled toward the lighter grey.
More ice melted on my tongue.
More.
Please, more.
It came again, this time the frost didn’t just coat my lips but dribbled down my chin.
I felt that.
I tracked the slow-moving trickle. I relished in the intensity—in the sheer magnitude of survival.
I want to survive.
I want to wake.
I searched every crevice that I’d already searched before. I scratched at the blackened corners. I reached for the endless ceiling.
I lost myself to fighting and almost missed the gift that switched grey into red, granting the first blaze of colour in so long.
Colour!
I blinked at the blinding pigment.
Violent crimson and bittersweet scarlet.
Sanguine and vermillion.
Words spilled from my mind that’d forgotten speech and intellect.
A colour wasn’t just a colour. Colour was what painted the world with dimension and depth. It was what gave life purpose and precision—the honour of being alive to witness such saturation of self.
I inhaled with lungs I couldn’t see and bathed in the colour of red.
It felt warmer than black.
It promised to keep me awake, all while another sensation thunderstruck my anesthetized world.
Taste.
Sweet.
Sharp and fresh and perfect.
Berries.
I closed my eyes and allowed the third gift to wash through me. To grant another tear in my paralysis, to slowly bring me more aware.
So long since I’d tasted.
Just like colour, flavour gave meaning to the world. It made eating more than perfunctory but pleasurable. Flavour was a goal, driving us to cultivate and experiment, to create recipes and source new ingredients.
Flavour was another rung on my ladder, allowing me to creep higher from the darkness. To cling to the scaffolding. To have something tangible when the claws of darkness wrapped around my ankle and tried to claim me again.
I’d been reduced to nothing but three things.
Temperature, colour, and taste.
Three things that I’d always taken for granted but now were the three most important things to me.
My senses shook off their atrophy and craved more stimulation.
More!
Please, more.
I basked in the treasures.
I was grateful and in awe, but I was also greedy.
Greedy for sight and sound and touch.
For her.
Eleanor...please.
Slowly, the berry taste faded, the ice melted, and the redness around me snuffed out. The ladder I’d formed vanished from beneath me, sending me hurtling back into the starkness.
NO!
I couldn’t go back.
I couldn’t die down there.
I couldn’t detach myself from every precious gift that a body could give me.
I needed to touch again, laugh again, swim again.
I needed to marry the goddess I was fated to meet and get on my knees before her and offer her everything.
I owed her everything because I knew these flashes of awareness were thanks to her.
She was the one interrupting the midnight.
The one throwing me lifelines and trying to pull me free.
I didn’t want to let her down. I didn’t want to leave her alone.
Give it to me again!
The blackness thickened.
I slipped.
A diving belt lassoed around my middle, complete with weights and anchors, yanking me into the deep.
...
...
...
Blue lit up my world, drenching me in periwinkle, teal, and cobalt.
I was ready this time.
I charged toward the pigment. I harnessed a body I could not see and used colour as my instrument to feel it.
To slip into fingers and toes.
To focus on the softness along my back and the faint throbbing in my legs.
I gave up on swimming toward a surface that didn’t exist and instead fought to regain ownership of something that would have the power to keep me from the black’s grasp.
Ice returned...smeared gently along my lower lip before inserting just a little onto my tongue.
Flavour smashed through me, vicious and all-consuming.
It tasted like summer and sunshine.
Blueberries.
Ambrosial medicine making me want more and more and more.
I moaned with greed.
I tried to stick out my tongue for a bigger serving.
Nothing moved.
Why can’t I goddamn move?
I couldn’t do this anymore.
I couldn’t be trapped here any longer.
I wanted to open my eyes.
Open my eyes!
Open my eyes!
My furious heart pumped hard, filling the void with rapid drumbeats.
I lost it.
My heart had killed me, yet it was the only part of me still alive. It’d deleted me as its host and now existed in an empty chest, keeping an empty body the prison for a broken mind.
I couldn’t accept that.
I won’t!
It’s mine.
I went wild.
I sank into violence and beat up nothing and everything.
...
...
...
Another taste of ice.
Along with a fourth gift.
A gift that I’d had at the start of my incarceration but had lost along the way.
Hearing.
“...so hard, seeing you like this.”
That voice.
Like stardust and sand, like raindrops and satin.
Eleanor.
I stopped my endless war.
I hung in the darkness to listen.
“I’ve tried everything, Sully. I’ve argued with Louise about what I’m doing. She tells me I could kill you. That I might choke you by giving you a taste. But...the first night I ran my finger with berry smoothie along your bottom lip, your heart spiked. Did you feel it? Did it mean anything at all? Can you hear me, or are
