Ch. 37

“Cognizance”

Lady Mihaela, you, we are ticking… Tic tock…Kiza purrs velvet voice purrs in my mind, unsettling and relentless, each word echoing like a distant, annoying song.

I don’t have a moment to register myself, shift back into my true self before I am surrounded. The world spins around me, changing shapes and blurring faces. Zanir figure fades into the background as other presences close in, hands pressing gently yet firmly onto my shoulders.

I sway, caught in a current I can’t control. Voices whisper around me, too muffled to understand, like an old song only half remembered. A flash of deep red — the color of spilled wine — swims before my eyes, pooling and then splintering into darkness. The sensation twists my stomach. I can’t tell if it’s from the colors, the dizzying motion, or something deeper, a sickness, stirring inside.

“Get… Gaelira…” The voice feels distant, like it is slipping through layers of fog.

I feel movement beneath me. I’m floating, yet my feet don’t touch the ground. Carried. Of course. Fucking fantastic.

The light around me fades, darkness swallowing the remains of the autumn’s chill as I am brought indoors. I catch a fleeting smell of lavender — soft and familiar — mingling with earth and something sweeter, cherries perhaps? The rhythmic grind of a mortar and pestle reaches my ears, steady as a heartbeat. Someone is mixing something. For me? The thought slips away as my head pulses, a wave cutting through the fog, filling my ears with a high, painful ringing.

Everything is a give and take, Kiza whispers, his voice curling through my mind. You gave wall after wall and built a door. It is time you let it all fall.

A cup is pressed to my lips. The liquid is warm, sliding over my tongue with a strange, almost bitter taste, mingling with something floral and metallic. It slides down my throat, heavy and thick, leaving an aftertaste that lingers, earthy and crisp.

My head feels like it is floating, a soft, numbing haze settling in, spreading from the back of my skull to my fingertips. My body is sinking, but my mind won’t surrender — it fights, clawing the against the fading edges of consciousness, demanding to stay alert. Fragments of thoughts flash by in a wild blur — Kiza’s voice echoing in the background, the gripping of hands to catch my fall, and Zanir’s face — his shadow flickering somewhere just beyond my reach. A pulse of defiance thunders in my chest, keeping me connected as everything else dims, as if my mind alone could drag me back to the surface, refusing to let go.

—

A vast, blinding light surrounds me as I open my eyes, making me squit against the pure white stretching endlessly in every direction. My feet find solid ground, yet when I look down, there is no trace of earth, only the faint shimmer of something beneath me, like a mist trapped in glass. The emptiness feels too large, but the silence is heavy, as if holding back a sound that is just out of reach.

In the distance, mysterious shapes begin to form — mountains dark as ink, their jagged peaks cutting into the horizon, trees rising like phantoms with branches that sway despite the still air around me. A river winds along one side, glinting silver, rippling even though there is no breeze to move it. Above, storm clouds coil and churn, thunderheads moving in slow, purposeful waves, their darkness pressing down like a waiting threat. I can feel the weight of it all pulling me forward, drawing me toward a place that seems both close and impossibly far away.

Despite the vastness, there is a strange sense of enclosure, like I am inside something far greater than myself. I take a step, my foot echoing in silence, and I realize I don’t know where I am — or if any of this is even real.

Zanir’s voice slips through the silence, curling around me with a velvet-softness that makes something twist deep in my stomach — not with panic, but with something else, something unsettling as it is turning more into something clings to parts of me I don’t even remember.

My heart clenches at the sound, the reminder of him slicing through the emptiness here, stirring memories of his eyes fixed on me, watching as I lost control. The humiliation is fresh, his voice doesn’t taunt though, it reaches, steadying me in ways I don’t want to admit.

I spin around, his voice moving through the air until they quickly fall.

The actual fuck?

There is no sight of him, no tall used-to be vampire anywhere in sight. I turn again, searching, half-expecting his figure to appear from the clouds or distant mountains, but there is only an endless, white void around me, stretching on and on, swallowing anything in its path.

My eyes dart to the storm clouds far in the distance, hovering like some forgotten thought along the distant horizon. Mountains and darkness edge the white expanse, blurred and unfocused, as if they’re waiting to sharpen when I am ready to see them. I can’t reach them, but I know they’re there lurking, pulling at the edges.

What is happening? And where the hell am I?

A single shadow shifts, curling like smoke against the endless white, twisting in place, its shape almost calling.

You are in your mind. Zanir’s voice moves with fluidity, matching the dance of the shadow.

My mind. The realization settles over me, strange and heavy. I scan the blank, white spaces surrounding me — the vast desolation that spans out until it meets the clouds and mountains far away, just barely there, but ever daunting. It is still, utterly still, and the quiet is thick and strange, like into a place where life once thrived but now feels hollow and untouched.

This is nothing like the mind I know.

No dark stone walls press in on me, no splintered wooden door leading to painful memories, no muffled screams ringing from some distant part of me I can’t control. There is no constant thrumming of trapped creatures, no primal roars or clawing from the beast within. Even its ever-present presence, always lurking and waiting, is absent, leaving only this unsettling calm.

But a shadow draws my attention.

A single, swirling shadow stands before me, shifting faintly against the white. My eyes keep drifting back to it, even as I try to grasp the surrounding void. I can’t shake it, this pull toward the shadow, as if it’s a part I have somehow forgotten or cast aside.

The shadows always liked you, even when you banish them. Zanir’s voice slips in again, soft and knowing, and something in his tone changes an ache deep within me. His words seem to drift from nowhere and everywhere at once. But this one — this one has always been drawn to you the most. A loyal one, who even breaks command for you, calling you light one.

The shadow curls, almost tenderly, as if recognizing me, as if waiting for me to approach. A strange warmth threads through me at his words, mingling with the cold expanse of the void. I don’t know whether to reach out or run, but his voice, Zanir’s voice, pulls me closer.

The shadow remains in the corner of my eye, lingering with a faint comfort. I remember how it stayed close the first night I met Zanir, always watching, always hovering. And later, at the inn, when he sent it to me — a strange, unspoken peace in the quiet dark. Even now, in this blank expanse, it feels like a memory that is refusing to fade like the others.

Zanir’s shadows… they’re a part of him, an extension, like he once said, as if they were his own limbs. He controls them, bends them to his will — yet sometimes they seem to have minds of their own. This one especially.

My thoughts swirl as I watch it twist in the distance, wondering how much of Zanir lives inside each shadow. I almost reach for it, then hesitate, struck by the realization —

Little bat… I can hear you.

Oh, shit. The words echo, sharp against the void.

I stand there, exposed, and suddenly aware of how much the void stripped away. No vest, no daggers strapped to my side, not even the opal blade I kept so close… until I threw it at Zanir. But there is only me — raw and unguarded, as though the endless white around me has carved away every defense.

I am still in the simple clothes I wore when I left the inn, but they feel different here. My sleeves are rolled up, and the marks of my past kills crawl along my arms like memories written in ink, the Samca, intricate and curling as if to guide my hand on my wrist, and even my companion bound with Halfy — reminders of everything I have had to become.

And my hair… is down, loose in black waves, hints of purple gleaming in the strange, soft light. The ends brush over my shoulders, drifting down my back. Here, in this place, it is safe to let it fall as it is. No, Mother, to cut it short, no command to pin it up tight. Just me, in the way I have always wanted to be seen.

When I realize Zanir can still hear me, I feel my cheek fill with heat — a frustration I can’t hide. I tuck a strand of of hair behind my ear, half-aware that the gesture only reveals me further. The shadow in the distance swirls, almost as if in response, and it moves quickly past me, and I catch it glide just past my skull, brushing by me as if drawn to something. For a moment, before I turn toward it, it seems to pause, like it is lingering over something it remembers — a detail, I shuffle away because I don’t understand it… yet.

The shadow distracts me, but only for a second before it is once again dancing in the distance, and then my stomach sinks. Zanir told me I was in my mind.

A cup on my lips, that warm liquid… What did they give me?

His voice slips through again, calm and far too amused. Little bat, I know you are smart. What do lavender, cherry juice, and purple mushroom roots make? And yes, with a hint of valerian root, too.

I close my eyes as the truth hits me. A sleeping potion. A fucking sleeping potion.

—

Flashes of a memory drift through the whiteness carrying me back to that night in the castle. I remember creeping along the silent halls, careful and precise, gathering ingredients no one thought I would know how to use. Tucking dried lavender into my sleeve, crushing cherries into paste, grinding the purple mushroom roots to powder.

Every step was a small act of rebellion. I had mixed it all in secret, my hands steady as I poured it into tiny vials, slipping them to the guard on my post in my wing, under the cover of night, and a sweet innocent smile.

—

I open my eyes, swallowing the bitter taste the memory leaves behind, reminding me of both triumph and escape.

Frustration bubbles up inside me, simmering close to a boil. The storm cloud in the distance make thunder claps that echo through the void.

Remain. Calm.

A sleeping potion. The same damn trick I used to slip out of that stone cage, and now it is been used on me? Oh, how Nyx’s karma has come back to .

My mind clings to the details, turning them over in search of some answer. Valerian root. The words tickle at the edge of my thoughts, and suddenly, as if in response, something shifts beside me — a dark-wooded bookshelf, like the one back in the Grand Library, only this one is here in the white void of mind. What the… This is all so bizarre, but I reach out anyway, my fingers brushing the spine of a thick book labeled ‘Valerian Root Properties’ in bold, heavy letters.

I flip in open in my hands, and the pages spill their secrets. ‘Valerian root: frequently used in calming potions, emotional dampeners…’ I skim through, eyes narrowing as understanding settles, sharp and bitter. They didn’t just put me to sleep, they added a sedative — a downer — to dull my emotions, keep my powers in check, smother everything that makes me… me.

Calm, I tell myself, but the words are losing their grip. I lost control. It’s reasonable they would try to contain me, make sure I don’t hurt anymore. Protect them, protect me…

But as I piece it together, guilt pricks at the edges of my mind, mingling with resentment. They thought I needed to be subdued. My friends feared me enough to drug me, the same option I used to escape now turned back on me as if I were some wild creature in need of a cage.

I try to breathe, to focus on calming myself, but there is no grounding it. The irony cuts deep, and my mind twists on it. They’re right to be afraid, I tell myself, even as I try to resist. Look at how dangerous I can. Maybe I should be locked away. Hidden behind those stone walls again, before something else goes wrong. Maybe this is just proof that —

No. I clench my fists, teeth gritting, my breaths coming short and fast. I try to steady myself, but the frustration finally cracks through.

A scream rips from my throat, cold and broken, cutting through the endless white void around me. It echoes, mirroring the storm that is starting to rage in the distance, spiraling outward, and I just let it go, unfiltered and unrestrained.

My breathing stutters, chest heaving as the scream fades into the empty white, leaving a call that seems to linger and taunt me, as if my own mind is haunted by the sound of my breaking. I feel like I am falling, spiraling into pieces, each sharp edge of my fear and doubt cutting deeper, pulling me apart. My guilt, my frustration — everything that has been clawing at me — has broken free, scattered like jagged glass across this blank space, and it only cuts me more as I keep picking up the pieces, trying to piece together beyond repair.

Then, cutting through it all, his voice slips in, smooth and weighted, each word dripping with an infuriating calm.

Do you know how to relax?

I freeze, stunned. The air seems to change, every thought tangled and unraveling around me, faltering in the wake of his question. His voice is measured, like he just noticed a slight inconvenience, as if he hasn’t been here listening to every raw, fractured thought, every unspoken fear that has clawed through me. I feel so exposed, vulnerable in the wake of everything he has heard — my silent cries at the inn, my panic and doubts, the pain of memories that cut too deep to fully heal. Yet he is unaffected, unshaken.

That simple question, offered with maddening composure, brings everything to a halt. It is almost absurd — this measured calm, this undisturbed curiosity in the face of my collapse.

And yet… as his words sink in, my guilt and frustration begin to dull, like the question itself is an anchor, drawing me back down from the edge. Do you know how to relax? It hangs in the air, something I have forgotten how to do long ago. I feel something in me still, as if he has reached out and caught the pieces mid-fall.

All at once, the fight drains out of me, leaving a strange, heavy quiet. I don’t have an answer for him, but for the first time, I don’t have to all the answers. And in that silence, I can almost imagine what it might feel like — to let it all go, just for a moment.

It’s almost tempting.