Consciousness didn't return. It was replaced.
The darkness wasn't empty or peaceful. It was a dense, sensory fog where my body was a distant, ill-reported rumor and reality was a series of violent, vivid intrusions.
Sensation: DRAGGING.
My heels scraped over rough, icy stone. The pain was a faint, thready thing, reported from miles away. My body was a sack of grain, heavy and limp. The world bobbed and swayed nauseatingly. Underground. The thought floated, detached. The air smelled of wet earth and ancient mortar. The tunnels. The old royal tunnels. Panic tried to surface, a trapped bird fluttering in the cage of my ribs, but a thick, sweet syrup in my veins smothered it.
Sensation: LIGHT.
Flickering, orange-yellow light against my closed eyelids. Not electric light. Candlelight. Dozens, hundreds of points of heat, painting swirling patterns on the inside of my skull. The air changed earthy dampness replaced by the cloying scent of incense. Sage. Moonblossom. And beneath it, something metallic and cold, like old blood and charged ozone. Ritual magic. The bird in my ribs beat its wings harder.
Sensation: SOUND.
Chanting. Low, guttural, rhythmic. Words in the Old Tongue, the language before common speech, the language of the Moon Goddess and deep, primal magic. The sounds didn't enter my ears; they vibrated in my teeth, in the marrow of my bones. They were spiders spinning webs of compulsion, each syllable another silken strand binding my will. Stop. Make it stop. But I had no voice. I was a prisoner behind my own eyes.
Sensation: TOUCH.
A hand. Sliding into mine.
My whole being focused on that single point of contact. It was large. Warm. Criss-crossed with the rough texture of scars and calluses. His fingers laced through mine, not with tenderness, but with a desperate, clenching tightness, as if holding on was the only thing preventing us both from being swept away.
Stellan.
I knew it with a certainty that came from somewhere deeper than the drugs, deeper than the magic. His hand was the only real, anchor in this swirling nightmare. I tried to squeeze back, to send a signal: I'm here. I'm trapped too. But my fingers were limp, unresponsive puppets.
Sensation: PAIN.
A sharp, burning puncture at the side of my neck. White-hot and precise. It should have made me scream, but it was muffled, happening to someone else. The pain quickly dissolved, transforming into a deep, throbbing pulse that spread warmth through my veins. It felt… significant. Permanent. A claim. Horror, thick and oily, rose in my throat. No. Not that. Anything but that.
Sensation: VOICE.
My voice.
It floated from my lips, ethereal and dreamy, utterly divorced from my screaming inner self. "I bind myself to you. In moonlight and shadow, in truth and in silence, for now and until the moon falls from the sky."
The words were beautiful. Sacred. They were the highest vows of my people, the words my parents had spoken. To hear them come from my mouth, empty of all feeling, hollowed out by compulsion, was a violation worse than any physical pain. I was defiling my own heritage.
Sensation: HIS VOICE.
It responded, a deep, resonant baritone stripped of all its usual command, flat and empty as a drum. "I accept your bond. My strength for your protection, my throne for your shelter, my life for your truth."
His life for my truth. The irony was a knife twist. He was pledging his life for the very secret that had gotten my family killed.
Sensation: SOUND AGAIN.
A woman's laughter. High, bright, and cruelly amused, cutting through the solemn chanting like shattering glass.
Vivian.
The sound pierced the fog, a dart of pure, undiluted hatred. She was here. Watching. Enjoying this.
Sensation: PRESSURE.
Cold, heavy metal being slid onto my ring finger. It settled there with a finality that felt like a sentence. Silver. Thrumming with captive magic. A shackle dressed as a jewel.
Sensation: MOVEMENT.
My hand, guided by invisible forces, closing around a stylus. Watching it move, a thing of alien will, as it scratched two names onto a sheet of pristine parchment.
Lucy Hart.
Stellan Voss.
The signatures looked real. They looked willing.
I was drowning. Not in water, but in ceremony. Each sensation, each sound, each touch was a stone tied to my ankles, pulling me deeper into a ritual I never chose. I fought with the only thing I had left my mind. I screamed inside the prison of my skull, I raged, I begged the Moon Goddess to intervene, to strike this blasphemy down.
But the chanting continued. The candles flickered. His hand stayed clenched in mine, a mockery of partnership.
The dream deepened, the fog thickening, pulling me under a final, smothering wave of stolen vows and forced magic. The last thread of my conscious self dissolved, leaving only the echoing, phantom sensation of a wedding band, cold and heavy, on a finger that no longer felt like my own.