Darby
Muddled words dot along the edge of my tattered consciousness, broken and incomprehensible, and I can’t make out the reason for them without coming completely around. That means rising through the desolate wasteland that remains of my connection to my grove. It’s a daunting task, facing the yawning emptiness, the freefall, and for days I can’t bring myself to try.
I had thought myself the master of my own fate, a singular soul. I thought myself above such attachments. I was careless, naïve. The simple lives that I’d touched through the long years in my tiny corner of existence, blurred one into the next, and had changed me, bound me, in undetectable increments. Now bereft of each of them, I didn’t know what living looked like anymore.
But Ian did, steady and solid against me
