Ayla
I came back slowly.
Like surfacing through ice, breath trapped beneath something heavy and old and full of weight. The air around me was too still, and my skin felt wrong hot in places, cold in others, the ache in my stomach sharp enough that it curled me from the inside out before I even understood where I was.
The ceiling above me wasn’t my chamber.
I didn’t know it at first, not with the flickering torchlight and the quiet clatter of glass somewhere in the distance. But the scent was wrong cleaner, sharper, laced with mint and metal and something beneath it all that made my chest tighten.
Then came the voices.
Soft. Firm. Not unkind, but muted by concern.
“She’s stable for now,” someone said. A woman. Familiar. “The swelling has gone down, but the pulse was erratic for hours
