Chapter 12 Taste of Memory

Why does blood show the past?

They got Mira onto the bed properly between them.

It took longer than it should have. She was dead weight in the way unconscious people always are, all wrong angles and no cooperation, and the space between the floor and the mattress felt enormous. But they managed. Zara straightened her legs. Caelith pulled the blanket up.

Mira's face was pale but still. Her breathing had evened out into something that sounded like sleep even if Caelith was not entirely sure it was.

"She's still in there," Caelith said quietly. Not a question.

Zara stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed and her jaw set.

"Yes," she said. "Weaker. But yes."

“The brat is too weak” Mira spoke or rather the being inside her. She went quiet again.

The room had that particular held quality to it. Like the air itself was waiting.

Caelith sat on the edge of the bed beside Mira and looked at her friend's face. The softness of it. The familiarity. Every expression she had ever made living somewhere in the architecture of it even now when she was still and absent.

She reached out and took Mira's hand.

She didn't plan what happened next.

She was not sure she could have planned it even if she had tried.

Her vision went first. Not dark. Just wrong. Like a filter dropping over everything, draining the colour out of the room until it was all pale and grey and slightly unreal. She blinked. It didn't clear.

Zara said her name from somewhere that felt further away than the foot of the bed.

Caelith looked down at Mira's hand in hers.

And her body moved without asking her.

She turned Mira's hand over slowly. Lifted it. And bit down on the tip of her finger. Lightly. Just enough. A single small point of contact.

The taste of blood hit her tongue.

And the room disappeared entirely.

_______

Fragments. Not a story. Not a sequence. Just pieces dropped from a height, arriving in no order, meaning nothing in isolation and everything together.

A vast dark place that had no walls and no floor and no sky but existed anyway with complete certainty.

A book. Not the journal she had been imagining, leather bound and findable. Something older than that. Something that existed the way a wound exists, not as an object but as an absence, a place where something had been removed from the world and the world had never healed around it.

A woman. Ancient. Standing in the dark with a stillness that was not peace but the opposite of peace. Something that had been waiting so long it had forgotten what it was waiting felt like. Just the waiting remained.

Her face.

Caelith almost caught it. Almost held it still long enough to read it.

Then it was gone.

A name. Written somewhere she could not locate, in something that was not quite language, not quite sound, not quite light. She reached for it the way you reach for something in a dream, knowing already that reaching would dissolve it.

It dissolved.

A door. Sealed. From both sides simultaneously in a way that should have been impossible. And behind it something that pressed and pressed and pressed with the patience of something that had never once considered giving up.

Then a sensation. Sharp and sudden. Like a cord being cut.

The presence that had been lingering in the room snapped backward all at once, there and then gone, like a held breath finally released in reverse. It had felt what she was doing. Had seen itself seen. And it had left. Quickly. Completely. Taking what it could and abandoning the rest.

The memories dissolved with it, faster now, the fragments scattering before she could catch a single one cleanly.

She surfaced gasping.

---

The room was back. Warm and solid and entirely itself.

Mira lay still beside her, breathing evenly, her hand still in Caelith's. The small mark on her fingertip had already stopped bleeding.

Caelith sat very still and waited for the world to stop tilting.

Her eyes felt strange. Heavy. Like they had been somewhere they were not designed to go. She couldn't feel the presence of the being in the room and Mira's breath had steadied.

"Caelith."

Zara's voice. Right beside her now. Close enough that she must have crossed the room without Caelith noticing.

"I'm okay," Caelith said. Her voice came out rougher than expected.

"Your eyes."

"I know." She blinked slowly. The grey was fading. She could feel it fading, like colour returning to a photograph. "I think it's passing."

“What the actual f@#k did I just see”.

Both of them turned.

Elias stood at the threshold of the bedroom with his jacket still on and his keys still in his hand and an expression on his face that had moved well beyond confusion into something that had no name yet.

His eyes moved from Mira unconscious on the bed, to Zara standing over her, to Caelith sitting beside her with grey fading from her eyes and Mira's hand still held in both of hers.

The silence stretched.

"I came back early," he said finally. Very carefully. "My sister was fine. She didn't need me to stay." A pause. "What." Another pause. He raised his brows obviously demanding answers.

Nobody answered immediately.

Outside the rain had stopped entirely.

The silence it left behind was enormous.

---