Chương 33: The Long Walk Back

Nobody answered him, and the silence itself became an answer Keth's body understood before his mind was willing to. He pushed himself upright too fast, the world tilting hard around him, and Elian's hands caught his shoulders, not to comfort him this time but to physically hold him from collapsing again.

"She's alive," Elian said, fast, urgent, the words tumbling out before Keth's rising panic could fully take hold.

"Keth, look at me, she's alive." Keth's eyes found her. Talia lay a few feet away, where the deer-thing's charge had finally landed after the barrier's collapse, not where Keth had first seen her scrambling backward, but flung further, hard, against a low outcrop of coral that had cracked beneath the impact.

Her chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven movements, blood soaking through her tunic in a wide, dark stain across her side, her face gone pale in a way that made Keth's stomach drop straight through the ground.

"Don't move her," Lira's voice cut through, sharp, absolute, already crouched beside Talia with two fingers pressed against her throat, checking a pulse with the same brisk, practiced efficiency she brought to everything that mattered.

"Rib's likely broken. Possibly punctured something underneath it. Moving her wrong kills her faster than the wound will on its own."

"She has a pulse," Keth said, needing to hear it confirmed aloud, needing the words spoken into the world where they'd become real.

"She has a pulse," Lira confirmed, flat, though something in the flatness carried more strain than usual.

"Weak. Thready. We need to move, now, carefully, but now." Aurelian was still on his knees a short distance away, staring at his own hands as though they belonged to someone else, the smoke still curling faintly from his fingers, his face a mask of shock that hadn't yet found room for anything as coherent as grief.

"Aurelian." Lira's voice, sharper now, cutting through whatever fog had claimed him.

"I need you functional. Now. Help me build a litter, whatever we can improvise, we're not carrying her by hand across that distance." Something in the command seemed to reach him where nothing else had, and Aurelian moved, stiff and mechanical, gathering fallen branches and stripping his own coat to bind them together with a speed that suggested his body, at least, still remembered how to be useful even while his mind remained somewhere else entirely.

Elian helped Keth stand, though standing felt, for a long moment, like an achievement beyond his current capacity. His legs shook. His vision swam at the edges. But he stood, because standing was the only thing that felt like doing something instead of simply watching, and he stumbled to Talia's other side, kneeling carefully, taking her hand in both of his own.

"Hey," he said, voice cracking.

"Hey, stay with us. You hear me? Stay." Her eyelids fluttered, briefly, something that might have been recognition passing behind them before slipping away again into unconsciousness, and Keth held onto that flicker with everything he had left, because it was the only thing in the entire clearing that felt like hope.

The walk back to the wall took longer than it should have, every step measured and careful, Lira directing the litter's movement with an authority that left no room for panic even as her own voice occasionally caught, just slightly, on words that should have come out perfectly flat. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

Keth walked beside the litter the entire way, one hand never leaving Talia's, watching her chest rise and fall in shallow, uneven breaths that seemed, more than once, to falter entirely before catching again a heartbeat later.

"She's strong," Elian said, walking on Keth's other side, his voice hoarse from spending everything he had earlier and having nothing left to spend on comfort now except honesty.

"She survived this long. That has to mean something."

"It has to," Keth agreed, though the words felt thin and insufficient against the weight of what he was actually feeling. The gate came into view eventually, and the sentries there took one look at the litter, at the blood, at the particular urgency in Lira's stride, and didn't ask a single question before waving them through.

"Hospital," Lira said, not slowing.

"Eastern ward. Now."

The hospital sat where it always had, near the harbor's edge, and Keth had passed it a hundred times without ever properly looking at it — a long, low building of dark stone, older than the garrison beside it, its architecture belonging to some earlier century entirely, all narrow arched windows and thick, load-bearing walls built the way people once built things meant to survive sieges rather than simply weather.

Heavy timber beams crossed the ceiling inside, blackened with age and smoke from a thousand fires kept burning through a thousand cold nights, and the corridors ran narrow and dim, lit by hanging lanterns rather than any modern fixture, their light throwing long, uneven shadows across walls stained by decades of use nobody had ever fully scrubbed away.

They moved through it fast, boots echoing off stone floors worn smooth and slightly uneven from centuries of feet doing exactly what Keth's were doing now — rushing someone toward whatever thin mercy the building had to offer.

An orderly met them at the ward entrance, took one look at Talia's wound, and shouted something down the corridor that brought two more staff running within seconds, their movements fast, practiced, the particular efficiency of people who had done this so many times that panic had long since been trained out of their hands even if it hadn't been trained out of their hearts.

"Family?" one of them asked, already helping ease Talia off the makeshift litter and onto a proper stretcher.

"Squad," Lira said.

"I'm her commanding officer."

"She'll need surgery. Possible internal bleeding, from the look of that wound." The staff member's eyes were already assessing, cataloguing, moving faster than his words.

"We'll do what we can." They took her through a set of heavy double doors at the corridor's end, thick oak reinforced with iron banding, the kind of door built to keep a room's contents contained rather than simply closed, and the doors swung shut behind the stretcher with a heavy, final sound that left the four of them standing in the dim corridor with nothing left to do except wait.

The waiting room, if it could be called that, was a narrow stone alcove lined with hard wooden benches, a single window high in the wall letting in a thin shaft of gray evening light that did nothing to warm the space. Keth sat with his hands still faintly trembling, the aftershock of whatever he'd done in the clearing still working its way out of his body in fits and starts he didn't fully understand yet.

Elian sat beside him, silent, his own exhaustion plain in every line of his posture, though his eyes stayed fixed on the heavy oak doors as though watching them hard enough might somehow hurry whatever was happening on the other side. Aurelian paced. He hadn't stopped since they'd arrived, his hands still faintly warm, the smell of smoke still clinging to his clothes, his face cycling between shock and a rising, helpless fury that had nowhere left to aim itself.

"I don't understand what happened to me," he said, finally, stopping mid-stride.

"One second I was watching the barrier break, and the next — I don't remember deciding anything. I just remember heat. So much heat."

"You awakened," Lira said, quiet, from where she stood near the window, her own composure holding by a thread thinner than any of them had seen from her before.

"Echo of Inferno, from the look of it. Rarer than standard Flame. More violent. It answers panic and grief rather than discipline."

"I didn't want it like that." Aurelian's voice cracked.

"I wanted — I don't know what I wanted. Not this. Not for it to cost this much to finally show up." Nobody had an answer for that. The corridor stayed quiet except for the distant, muffled sounds of activity beyond the heavy doors — footsteps, low urgent voices, the occasional clatter of something metal against stone — none of it clear enough to interpret, all of it terrible in its very ordinariness, the sound of a system doing exactly what it always did with bodies broken badly enough to need it.

Keth watched the doors. He didn't look away from them, not once, not even when his own eyes burned with exhaustion and something closer to grief than he wanted to name yet. He thought of Talia's face in the clearing, turned toward him even as the barrier failed, still holding something that had looked, impossibly, like reassurance. He thought of her voice, endless and bright, cataloguing coral density and probability theory and everything else the world offered her to be curious about.

He thought of the sweetroll she'd once compared to a rock, the plum wine she'd been so proud of, the notebook she carried everywhere, thick with cramped, enthusiastic handwriting nobody but Keth had ever properly bothered to learn how to read. Minutes stretched into what felt like hours, though the thin shaft of light through the high window barely seemed to move at all, as though time itself had slowed to match the particular agony of not knowing. Then the heavy oak doors opened.

The physician who emerged was not the same clinical man who'd once told Keth his lip would heal crooked. This one was older, gray-haired, his apron dark with stains that told their own story before he'd spoken a single word, his face carrying the particular weariness of a man who had walked through those doors to deliver news like this more times than any person should reasonably have to bear.

He looked at Lira first, some old instinct of rank and responsibility guiding his attention there before anywhere else, and the corridor went utterly, terribly silent, every one of them holding their breath without meaning to, waiting for whatever words came next to finally, mercifully, or unbearably, break the wait wide open.

"Commander," the physician said, quiet, careful, his eyes holding something none of them could yet read.

"A word, if I may. Alone." End of Chapter Thirty-Three