ShadowSong [Book 3]

Chapter 33 - Cornered and Cracked

The silence crept back, ringing in her head. Olivia covered her ears against it.

Strong because of it.

There'd been a song. He'd hummed her a song, a song that had fought back the silence, a song that she'd first heard on his violin, a song that'd lured her and flared the spark at her core into flames and smoke so suffocating that her breath had caught coals in her throat.

It was that song she hummed now, that song of golden fire and acrid smoke. It wasn't loud, wasn't strong, but it was enough, and the spark slowly flared back into a glimmering ember.

Nothing was really here, but she was. She was here. His song, her song, it fed the spark until she didn't need to hum to ward off the silence. It was fragile, it was cautious, but if it was half as stubborn as she was then it wasn't going anywhere any time soon. Her legs still shook, but she was pretty sure they weren't real anyway. There were far too many missing bruises and cuts, which really, was a rather morbid way of thinking about it, but if she stuck her head too far into the reality of 'probably in another hallucination' right now, she wasn't sure how long she was going to last before the last tether of her sanity snapped, and that really wasn't something she was looking forward to, because, well--

Olivia took a deep breath and forced herself to swallow down the hysterics.

Starlight, she really was out of it.

The silver figure cut from light was closer now, swaying a few metres away. It reached towards the horizon, where thunder from a distant storm was rolling in. The fog around them shifted, restless, and the figure looked back towards Olivia, the urgency clear.

"What do you want me to do?" Olivia asked, only half focused on the storm as she tried to decipher this figure before her. Though its entire being seemed formed from light, there were points that seemed... brighter, like the light came from within to form the whole. Olivia tilted her head. Like there were crystals imbedded in its skin, or--

The figure drew its arms inwards, taking a hesitant step towards Olivia before pulling back. It glanced at the storm, then back at Olivia, and finally, when the storm of silver mist was close enough for Olivia to see the darker, roiling haze within it, the figure finally made a decision.

It ran the last few steps to Olivia and embraced her.

The figure's light swallowed her, and Olivia almost screamed. Memories came flooding back of the light she'd stepped into from the Serpent's darkness, the light that'd gone one and on and on and on until it'd led her to the City that was hers-yet-not, the first hallucination, the beginning of her existence of a million realities where she'd watched them die a hundred times over, realities of being trapped and hunted and starlight, starlight she'd barely scraped herself back together, she couldn't do it again, she couldn't--

The aurorasong slammed into her chest like a second heartbeat. The blinding light receded, sucked into Olivia's chest like Viri did for Banshee's transformation. It slipped into her breathing, her blood, her mind. It wore Olivia like she was a second skin, calming her and soothing every piece of her that she had left.

Or at least, it was trying to. In the absence of her own, pure, home-grown fear and panic clogging her mind, Olivia knew exactly what this light had done. As strong as those feelings had been, the light had swept them away like they were nothing, and they weren't nothing. They were hers, dammit, and at this point, her mind was about the only thing she had left and she was going to keep her own Other-cursed feelings no matter how useless the damn things made her thank you very much.

The light sensed this, and responded by digging deeper into Olivia's mind, searching for those doubts and raising anxiety, but Olivia wasn't having it. She dove into the shadows of her mind, shadows so deep that they swallowed the light.