Ayla
The corridors stretched longer than I remembered, each arch of stone bending like the ribs of some ancient beast, and as the healers guided me through the flickering torchlight, the shadows on the walls seemed to breathe and lengthen until they swallowed the path behind us. Their hands never touched me, not even lightly, though I stumbled once on the uneven flagstone, and the only sounds they made were the occasional murmurs of courtesy soft, polite fragments that vanished before they reached my ears, words that meant nothing at all. They kept their eyes lowered as if looking at me too long might summon whatever had tried to kill me in the first place.
I told myself to keep count of the turns, the doors, the narrow flights of stairs that rose and fell like the spines of a serpent, b
