Corin
The darkness was not complete. It felt as though I were floating at the bottom of a deep, murky swamp, where sounds and lights reached me only as dull fragments. I had no sense of how much time had passed. Minutes? Days? I only knew that my body was no longer lying on frozen, damp forest litter. Something soft was beneath me, but that softness felt alien and dangerous.
Suddenly, a sharp, corrosive pain tore through my back. I groaned, but the sound caught in my throat, which was so dry it felt as if I had swallowed sand. I felt some kind of liquid trickling over the places where the whip had struck—not cooling, but burning, as if liquid fire were being poured into open wounds.
“Stay… still…” I heard a voice. It was deep, rumbling, like the low growl before an earthquake. The meani
