The darkness writhes all around, threading like mist, like smoke, but . . . not. Here, no light penetrates. No sound reverberates. The silence resounds -- blissful. Peaceful. But this creature is not at peace.
She hunts. Desperately, she hunts. Relentlessly, she hunts. Like a panther in truth, she scents at the shadows, searching for a whisper of a trail to follow as she has for the past two days and two nights. But there is nothing. Nothing. He is gone. Elsewhere.
He would never leave me.
Something has taken him. But she will find him and bring him back. She will always find him. There is no hiding from Zahra al-Dhahab, not in this place. Not in any place.
Something shivers in the darkness, then, soundlessly crooning to her, but just as she swivels her skull in that direction and begins to pad toward it--
She awakens.
Aurelian eyes slide open slowly, blearily, seeing her staring at the wall of her cabin, her back to the forecastle. That fucking forecastle. Sound filters in -- a veritable cacophony of conversation and mere life here within these cramped confines, seeking to choke out all thought. It hammers at her skull, pounding there just behind her eyes in a throbbing cadence, headache threatening.
A low snarl of irritation purrs from deep within her throat as she slinks up to her feet, resolve steeling in that moment. Headache? What fucking headache. She refuses, as if she's ever just been able to cast off one of her migraines, as if such a thing was as inconsequential as a piece of clothing. Easily discarded upon the floor.
Though there's little room in which to move here in this starboard cabin, she moves all the same. Prowling. Pacing. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Molten eyes train toward the open doorway, piercing like a crossbow bolt across the forecastle to pin upon the sight of a familiar hooded figure haunting the portside cabin. She watches him, just as he watches her. But she does not seek to breach the yawning distance between them. She does not go to him.
He needs you, too.That thought comes unbidden, skimming across the outer edges of the bubble which is her consciousness. But she shrugs it off, no pause in her prowling steps. When he was flirting with death, did she not lie at his side? Did she not catalog his every labored breath? Did she not bathe the blood from his broken body? Was she not the first sight he awakened to, when he finally clawed his way back out of the depths?
She did. And she was.
It was decided, then. Her pacing immediately ceases as she swivels upon her slippered feet, swirling in a single fluid motion back toward the bottom bunk to see her sliding into it once more. It is as uncomfortable a resting place as it ever is, all ribs and elbows and knees as she is. A woman of honed edges and hard lines, there is not a single scrap of padding upon her body to soften the thin mat beneath her and the hard wood beneath that. But she does not need comfort.
She just needs silence.
Her eyes close against the dim lighting filtering into the cabin through the window and her mind soon follows in drowning out the hum of the forecastle. Her breathing slows. Her body relaxes. And she unravels, thread-by-thread, her being melting away, back down into that dark. Down, down, down . . .
The shadows close in, as oppressive as roiling clouds of smoke. But she breathes in deep, letting their familiar chill fill her lungs. She bathes in them. Basks in them. Home. She's home. And she has a fucking job to finish.
She pads through the murk, skull swiveling here and there while she scents yet again. Searching. Where was it? She had felt . . . something. Finally, she had felt something. Was it him? It had to be him. But where? Where?
There.
The air about her trembles as faintly as the beating of a moth's wings in the split moment before something snaps taut -- like a silver thread piercing through the gloom, tethered to her own soul, leading out into the dark. She doesn't hesitate. She was already in motion the moment she felt it click into place. He lives.
Shadows wisp past as she explodes forward, loping out into this seemingly never-ending night. Finally, she has a trail to follow.
Finally, she can bring him home.