FIA
The darkness that took me was different from sleep.
Sleep had weight to it. A pressure that pulled you down and held you under until morning decided to let you go. This was the opposite. This was something that opened up instead of closing in. Like falling through the bottom of a bowl of water and finding air on the other side.
I landed somewhere.
Not with any force. More like settling. The way a leaf finds the surface of a pond, barely disturbing anything, barely leaving a mark.
I was standing in a corridor.
It had unpolished stone walls and a low ceiling. Torchlight that burned orange and did not flicker the way normal fire did, like even the flames here were careful to be quiet. The air smelled of something herbal and something underneath that, something older and harder to name. Like sickness that had been managed for so long it had become part of the architecture.
My instincts... Those new instinct of mine since the accident... woke before anything else did.
