Page 79 of Solivagant

I didn’t understand it. My head spun from the increasing pain.

I pulled another big stone away, and with it, I’d created an opening large enough to fit through.

Blood dripped over my lips and down my chin, seeping into the flannel of my shirt. I couldn’t bring myself to care.

Something else is in here.

My eyes adjusted to the brightness. It weren’t as nauseating to see in here, because whatever this place was, it hadn’t been here in the past. My vision blurred, but it wasn’t doubled with echoes of the past, so I could see the vague shape of something beneath the flowers.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

My pulse roared like thunder in my ears. Every step I took further into this place made my head hurt worse. I couldn’t stop. I needed answers.

Shaking fingers extended, brushing aside gold.

My chest tightened. My stomach twisted.

There was a body in here.

I were no stranger to those lately. But this was… different.

I pulled the flowers aside, revealing a man’s face. He didn’t look like he’d been dead for more than a day, but he had to have been.

His throat had been slit. My throat stung, a phantom blade sliced over it. I couldn’t breathe.

He had been torn open and emptied from sternum to stomach. My organs shifted in agony, my hands clutched at the flesh in an attempt to hold myself together.

Skin was missing from the side of his face, exposing his teeth and jaw, and I felt the pain across my own like it were happening to me. It had to be. Even though my fingertips told me otherwise when I raised them to claw at my cheek.

The beast inside me was thrashing, writhing, clawing. Dying.

I sobbed.

He… he was me.

The dreams. The memories. They belonged to him, that… version of me. The terrible things that had happened in this place, they’d happened to me when I was in that body.

Tusks must have brought me here. After it all.

He’d built a shrine of healing magic for a body long past saving.

It didn’t matter how many flowers he desperately filled it with. It wouldn’t change what had happened. Yet he still refused to take the magic back for himself, even when he needed it.

Why? Because he wanted to preserve me? Preserve this? A corpse he refused to let rot.

My heart was tearing in two. Grief. Longing. Pain. Mine, his, the piece inside me that had once belonged to him. It was all fractured.

I died.

I’m dying again.

I was having a heart attack or something. I was sure of it.

My vision blurred. My body still refused to take in air. Agony tore at all the places I’d been hurt before, when I was him.

Everything hurt. Everything was dark, and cold. I needed him. He could save me. Only he could.

“Tusks!” My voice was hoarse. Distant. It wouldn’t reach him. Again, it wouldn’t reach him.