-ALEXANDER-
A full month. Thirty agonizing days and nights had bled into each other since Lilian collapsed, a fragile bird broken by my own brutal hand. Thirty days of watching her, willing her to breathe, willing her to live, pouring my very essence into her. But it was all for nothing.
Her heart still beat, a faint, weak flutter beneath my palm, a cruel mockery of life. But there was no shift in her condition. Nothing at all. Her chest barely rose and fell. Her skin remained cold, pale, almost translucent. Her eyes, tightly closed, hid any spark that might have once resided within. She was a statue, a breathing corpse, suspended in a horrifying limbo between life and death.
The healers, the "best" I had summoned, now looked like broken men themselves. Their faces were drawn, their ey
