Evangeline woke to the sound of dripping water - not the eerie static of the In-Between, not the rumble of stormlight skies or the singing pulse of runes, but water.
Her eyes fluttered open to a ceiling cracked with age and spotted with mildew. Faint fluorescent light blinked overhead, flickering like a dying star, casting pale ghosts against walls peeling with time and decay. She was lying on a rusted gurney wrapped in scratchy wool blankets, and the air smelled like old antiseptic, blood, and something worse - rot laced with memories.
The In-Between was gone.
She blinked again, slower this time. Her body ached in strange, foreign places - not like trauma from an accident, but as if her molecules had been rearranged, as though she had been folded into origami and forced back into huma
