She exhaled and blinked. Looked around.
Confusion colored her brow, and she looked up at Etienne in bafflement. She didn’t have to say anything to make it clear that she had no idea how she had gotten here…
All of the tension in Etienne’s frame went out of him at that little, shaky breath. He let his hand slide off of Alphonse’s wrist and sighed in relief, his eyes closing for a moment. “This has got to be confusing. Come back inside, and I’ll explain. You’ll want your veil before anyone sees you anyway.”
He led the way back to his room and dropped into the chair at his desk so that Alphonse could have the bed, then jumped back up again to drape the blanket she’d made him around her shoulders. “You were only… not yourself for a few minutes,” he told her, trying to sound reassuring. “No one saw you.”
She was still trembling. Etienne was at a loss for what to do. Even if he could bind this creature once more, Alphonse was going to suffer. There was nothing he could do to protect her from the thing inside her head.
He had never felt so terribly inept.
And how did you tell your best friend, the person that was closer to you than your own siblings ever would be, that she was possessed by an ancient shadow you had convinced her to summon.
For a moment, he just looked at her, then dropped back down in the chair.
“I… was wrong.” Etienne supposed that the simple truth was all he could give her. “The thing we summoned… It wasn’t a memory. It was a shadow of something from the old world that needed a host to live again.”
He looked down at his ink-stained hands, weak and useless. “I can rebind it, but not from here. It has to be done in one of the temples left from the old world, high in the mountains of the Wildlands.”
❀
The weight and warmth of the blanket weren’t enough to reassure her as Etienne’s words sunk in. A creature from the old world, living beneath her skin. Sharing her heart, her mind, her body. Like a parasite.
Alphonse immediately felt herself to be dirty. She cringed and smoothed still-trembling hands over the blankets at her shoulders…
Etienne hadn’t known. Had acted too rashly. He’d been swept up in the excitement of discovery and too focused on the chance to be apprenticed to a master sorcerer. He hadn’t thought ahead of what might happen with his discovery. Now, she was infected.
Some internal part of Alphonse wailed at the thought, at the realization that her body was not her own. Not anymore.
But the calm, nurturing side chided her for her anger at Etienne’s hasty mistake. No one had intended this to happen. And Etienne had clearly stayed up all night finding a solution. There was a solution.
A solution that had them trekking across their land and into a hostile, vile territory that knew no peace and no order!
The small, terrified part of her that shrieked these thoughts trembled while something laughed in the dark corner of her mind. That something liked the idea of the Wildlands.
Alphonse shuddered, her voice hollow when she finally spoke.
“There is no other way?” She was near pleading. She would do anything to not have to go. Anything. To not have to face this.
He held out his hands, helpless. “I can look, Allee, but in all my research, I have only come across one single book dealing directly with the workings of the old world. It could take years if there’s even another to be found.”
He rubbed his face with his hands, desolate and exhausted. “I’ll try, Alphonse, if that’s what you want me to do, but this binding ceremony at Thlonandras… I think it's the fastest, surest way to get rid of it.”
The healer heaved a massive sigh, shaking and trembling with the effort to keep herself together. To keep herself from cracking apart. For this… this… thing to tear her apart.
If Etienne believed this was the best way. The surest way.
Her face was void of color or light as she nodded, feeling as if she were condemning herself. But wasn’t she already condemned?
Darkness was living within her. She was losing little pieces of herself. She was likely going to be held back within Moxous, if not expelled. Waiting for Etienne to find some shred of a clue, to search and search and search the catacombs, all while she woke up places she had no recollection of going to, did things so truly unlike herself, lost minutes, hours, days…
That wasn’t a life.
They could skip the summer semester. Take a break, travel to the Wildlands and back, and resume their studies in the fall.
“Alright. Alright,” she whispered, barely able to force herself to say it. “We’ll go.”
Chapter IV
Fifth Moon, Waxing Gibbous: Ingola
Blood slipped down the padded portion of Alphonse’s thumb, beading and gathering at the base of the digit. Amber eyes flickered as she watched the blood trickle and pool there, forming one large drop that would surely succumb to gravity’s pull, continuing down her forearm.
Such interesting stuff, blood.
Itmade up much of the human body. Of most bodies, human or otherwise. It was thick and hot and set her teeth on edge. The very sight of it made her skin crawl and her mouth moisten.
It hadn’t always.
Years of training as a healer had made Alphonse rather immune to the effects of blood. Just another factor of the body, just another facet to study and understand. Command.
How she had taken blood for granted all these years…
But now.
Now she couldn’t help but watch raptly as it started to trickle down her wrist. Something behind her heart stirred at the sight of the flowing droplets of viscera, and impulsively Alphonse pushed back against the feeling. She knew that feeling. It wasn’t a good one.
Thedesire surged stronger against her will, reaching for the
