Compos Mentis [Rávamë's Bane: Book 2]

Part II : Chapter 15 ~ A Long Walk Off A Short Cliff

A/N: Christ alive, it's been a while. Since last year technically... *gulp* Why is it the second we start getting to my favourite bits of the story, life swoops in and steals every scrap of my free time? Meh, I'm back here now either way, and I hope you guys can forgive me once again for a stupidly long wait.

Honestly you've all been so patient and encouraging with me it's still mind blowing, and I can't tell you have much that has meant to be recently. I won't take up space in this chapter explaining in detail, but to anyone who remembers the post I made on tumblr a few months ago about that new job — well, lets just say my instincts were right after all.

Might do another tumblr post at some point explaining what's been going on for whoever's interested, but in the mean time, let's get on with the real reason you're reading this page! The bloody story! :)

~ ♛ ~

When the lights came back on, I was sure I was dead.

I mean, the speed at which I'd hit the water alone should had been enough to knock me out cold. And even if by some miracle I hadn't landed on my head and died instantly, the water should have surely got me. I'd only need to have been under long enough for one lung-full, and it was certainly bright enough around me to inspire the stereotypical light at the end of the tunnel. But the blurred brightness around me wasn't at the end of a tunnel exactly...

It was everywhere, and colourful, and I didn't feel particularly dead.

In fact, I felt... happy? Excited, almost. Like I was exactly where I wanted to be, and looking forward to something special. Something fun.

'What the...?'

I couldn't unscramble my half-numb mind to work out what was happening to me. At least not before the blurred colours all around started to slowly sharpen into focus like the lens on a camera. It was like watching a film opening, the world gradually coming into crisp and sharp focus, only I was watching it through my eyes instead of a screen.

My eyes, and every other sense I had, too.

I could suddenly smell dry grass and sea-spray, feel summer sunlight on the skin of my arms and face, and as my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that I hadn't been looking at a light at the end of a tunnel at all. I was looking up at a midday sky as clear and bright as coloured glass — the polar opposite from the darkened one I'd seen only moments before as I fell from the cliff.

What was this? Some hallucination as I lay unconscious and dying at the bottom of the river?

But instincts rising up inside me said otherwise.

'It's a memory.'

A full-sensory, full panorama, come-along-for-a-the-ride memory, with HD surround sound, clearer than anything I'd come close to before. And I'd only had to fall headfirst off a cliff into a cold river to get it — good to know.

My heart was suddenly thundering like a war drum in my chest, and I couldn't tell if it was me, or my dreaming self, or both that the feelings were originating fro—

"Feeling whimsical, sister mine?"

My war drum heart just about stopped.

That voice.

Slowly, my gaze drifted on instinct from the sky down to where the voice had come from, and I came face to face with a smirk I'd only seen in flashes of painfully cloudy memories. Only in dim echos of a long forgotten life.