Losing Everything

Veyra POV

My breath catches in my throat, the last vision yanked away like a curtain torn from its rail, and I collapse inward as if the weight of what I’ve seen is too much for one soul to carry.

It should be over. I want it to be over, but even I know that it isn't.

The obsidian hums around me. The air begins to shift again. It presses against my skin with a foreign kind of cold, an unfamiliar bite that doesn’t belong to my memories. It sinks into my bones like a warning. My limbs go still. My breath holds without permission.

I’m not falling this time like before. I’m not tumbling through my own past or slipping into memories I’ve tried to bury. I’m standing upright. But the air smells wrong. Not like fire or blood or ash, though I have no doubt all of those will come soon after, but like something older. Wounded. Abandoned.

The ground beneath me is cracked and dry, the trees brittle skeletons that claw at the sky like they’ve long since given up hope of spring. The sun is low and a