Chương 106: Chapter 39: Surrounded by Wretched Souls

When she finally awoke, the light was soft, daylight, filtering through the high windows of the Cloister of the Forest. She was in her bed, beneath her own wool blankets, the familiar mattress sinking under her weight. For an instant, she believed everything had been a nightmare. A vivid and horrible nightmare, but only a dream, a horrible Halom. Then, she opened her eyes completely. They were all around her bed. Fjora, standing by the door, but not in her usual posture of an imperturbable sentinel.

She was slightly hunched, her pale face showing purplish bruises under one eye, and a thick, clean bandage covered a large part of her torso, from her collarbone to her ribs. Her breathing was a bit more labored than normal. She had fought, and she had been wounded. Valerian was there too, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. He wore clean clothes, but he had a superficial cut on his cheek that was already beginning to form a thin scab.

His smile was the usual one, idiotic and mocking, but his eyes, gray and piercing, did not stray from Selena, studying her with an intensity that was not customary. Maya and Ren were closer, standing at the edge of the bed. Maya had reddened eyes and an expression of deep worry. Ren appeared pale, his knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the bed. The relief of being alive, of being safe in her room, was inescapable. But then, the memory returned with the force of a hammer blow: the hand. The dull pain.

The blood. The stump. With a slow, fearful movement, Selena raised her left hand in front of her face. There they were. Her five fingers. Pale, perhaps a little thinner than she remembered, with a slight tremor she could not control, but they were there. Complete. From the thumbnail to the tip of her pinky. There was no scar, no mark of an amputation. Only intact skin, as if it had spent a long time in the shade. She looked at them, unable to comprehend. She opened them and closed them.

She felt the brush of her fingertips against her palm. They worked. They were there. —No… —she managed to murmur. Her voice hoarse from the nightmare night and her incredulity. —I lost them. I felt them… disappear. Valerian straightened from the wall and took a step forward. His smile softened a bit, losing part of its usual mockery. —You lost them, yes —he confirmed, his voice strangely serious. Maya and Ren turned around upon hearing the jester, their attention completely drawn toward him.

—A clean rebound, for attempting a greedy spell without having any idea of what you were mastering. A fair price, for being stupid. He paused, looking at her hand with curiosity that bordered on awe. —But then, right before passing out, you did something else. Something I didn't teach you, something you shouldn't know how to do. He drew a little closer, and his tone dropped to a whisper that was almost one of respect. —You reclaimed what was yours, crimson.

Or at least, you commanded the Void to return it to you, paying a price. The fingers… are yours. Again. Don't ask how. Because not even I entirely know. He raised an eyebrow, and the jester's mask peeked out again at a corner of his mouth. —Though, to be fair, they turned out a bit… scrawny. You'll have to feed them well. Isolde stepped between Valerian and the bed with the silent authority of a moving glacier.

Her hand, pale and bony, rested on the resonant's shoulder with a pressure that was not a suggestion, but a command. With a slight shove, she pushed him away from the side of the bed. —The girl —she said, her voice frigid, sharp as the edge of an ice knife. The jester could only step back; surprisingly, he did not protest at all. —Did better than many of my students. Her gaze drifted toward Ren, who lowered his head, a shadow of guilt crossing his face.

Isolde then cleared her throat, a dry sound that cut through the emotion-laden air. —And besides, I know of someone who played hide-and-seek instead of teaching class as he should. She turned back toward Valerian, and in her eyes, for an instant, there was not just the usual contempt, but something deeper: an ancient disappointment, a reproach that seemed to carry the weight of decades of friction and disagreements. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

—You are an idiot —she finally spat. The word did not sound like a casual insult, but like the bitter conclusion of an entire lifetime of observation, like the final diagnosis of an incurable disease. Valerian did not answer. He only held her gaze, and in his gray eyes, for a fleeting second, there was a flash of something that could have been resentment, or perhaps a painful acknowledgment of the truth in those words. Then, his mask of indifference slid back into place, and he looked away.

Maya, ignoring the tension between the two teachers, approached the bed and sat on a wooden chair that Samira had placed there. She took Selena's hand with a gentleness that contrasted with the strength with which she held it. Looking at her, Selena saw that her hazel eyes gleamed with a film of unshed tears, a tremor in her chin. —Together —Maya murmured. That single word, spoken in a sigh heavy with repressed weeping, was much more than a reminder. It was a promise.

The promise made beneath the stars and the murmur of the river, on the bridge that connected the university with the city. A promise carved in shared wretchedness. —Where you go, I go. Where you need me, I am. Where my wretched soul feels luminous… is beside yours. Selena scanned the room with her gaze.

She saw Fjora, wounded but imperturbable at her post as guardian; Samira, observing from the shadows with her analytical calmness; Ren, consumed by shame and frustration; Isolde, standing tall like a severe judge; Valerian, a specter of sarcasm and secrets. And Maya, anchored by her side, offering a bond that was the only beacon in the darkness of her condemnation. All eyes, even the hardest ones, had a veil of sadness.

That was the destiny of the resonants: they only had each other, a fraternity forged in anguish, a circle of souls condemned to extinguish early and in a horrible manner, bound by a power that devoured them from within. It was then, with her heart heavy from that truth and at the same time expanded by Maya's loyalty, that Selena spoke.

The words did not burst from her conscious mind, but from a deeper place, from the well of memories of another world, of another life, where the flash of affection was returned with artistry.

The words emerged before she could think them, resonating with a strange and beautiful cadence in the still air of the room: —Because I have you and I don't, because I think of you, because the night has its eyes wide open, because the night passes and I tell you you're dear to me, because you have come to gather your image, and you are better than all your images, because you are beautiful from your foot to your soul, because you are good from your soul to me, because you hide sweetly in pride, small and sweet, Maya…

As she pronounced her name, she extended the hand that Maya was not holding and, with infinite softness, passed the pads of her fingers over her friend's cheek, wiping away a tear that had finally broken free. The gesture was so tender, so foreign to the Crimson Duchess and so characteristic of the Selena she yearned to be, that an even deeper silence fell over the room. Ren, who had been clenching his fists so hard that his knuckles looked like white marble, let out a sigh that was almost a muffled sob.

—I wanted to protect you —he confessed. His voice was completely hoarse, laden with raw emotion. —I ran looking for you among the buildings, but… Master Valerian knocked me out. He lowered his head even further, shame tinting his neck and ears an intense red. It was hard to tell if it was fury toward himself, toward Valerian, or toward the helplessness consuming him. —I'm sorry. Valerian, breaking the spell of the moment, cleared his throat with a theatrical sound.

—You two —he said, nodding toward Fjora and Samira— step out of the room for a second. Resonant business. Both women, accustomed to the orders and mysteries of their masters, exchanged a quick look. Fjora, despite her injuries, straightened up, walking awkwardly due to her wound. Samira helped her, giving her a shoulder to lean on; both finally left, closing the solid wooden door behind them with a soft click. Once alone with the other resonants, Valerian approached the bed.

His expression lost every trace of the jester. It was serious, concentrated. He leaned over Selena, so close that she could see the tiny cracks in his dry lips, the weariness in the folds of his eyes. He formed a word with his lips. A mute, precise syllable. Immediately, all the senses of Selena, of Ren, of Maya, and even of Isolde, vanished. There was no transition.

Only absolute emptiness, the total deprivation of everything except sight, which remained fixed, helpless, upon the frozen scene: Valerian leaning over her, the room bathed in daylight, the faces of her friends turned into statues of cut-off expression. It lasted less than a second. When sound, touch, smell, and taste returned in an overwhelming torrent, Valerian had already straightened up. A slight, almost imperceptible tremor ran through his fingers. —Crimson —he said, his voice a bit rougher than usual— A gift.

A small one. It was only an hour of my life. You deserve it… because of what Isolde said. Selena looked down toward her left hand and stifled a gasp. The fingers that before were pale, a little thin, were no longer so. They had recovered their usual color, their texture, their exact shape. Even the small calluses at the base of her index finger and thumb, earned after months of clumsily training with the short scimitar, had returned. It was her hand. Completely.

Without a trace of the terrible amputation or the phantasmal recovery. Valerian had paid an hour of his own life, a fragment of his already shortened future, to restore what her rebound had damaged. It was not an act of pure kindness; it carried the bittersweet taste of a forced acknowledgment, of a debt paid grudgingly. But it was real. Before Selena could articulate a word of gratitude or a question, Valerian turned toward the door and said aloud, recovering his mocking and light tone: —Followers!

You may enter now. I only wanted to admire the duchess's beautiful body without the King knowing. —He winked at Fjora and Samira when they stepped back inside, his mask of a frivolous idiot perfectly back in place. Gratitude caught in Selena's throat, a knot of contradictory emotions that she chose to swallow in silence. The following hours passed in a constant flow of discreet care and low conversations. Little by little, the room emptied out.

Valerian vanished among the shadows with his usual lack of ceremony, taking with him the electric tension he always generated. Isolde, after one final, piercing look at Selena, left with Ren in tow, surely for a training session or a reprimand. Maya resisted, but in the end, a look from Selena and a promise to talk later convinced her to withdraw to rest.