The Grimoire of Yule by Adam Golden

Author:Adam Golden [Golden, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2018-10-25T23:00:00+00:00

Fresh Blood From Old Cuts

Drip.

He could barely breathe, the air was thick and stale, and yet sharp. Pulling it into his lungs was an effort, like climbing a mountain of sand, or breathing that sand. It stung his throat and burned his eyes. It hurt. He hurt. He hurt everywhere, a dull, radiating ache of pain which had been given time to settle.

Drip, drip.

The air stank of sweetness, cloying and nauseating, like an avalanche of rotting flowers. His stomach twisted as bile rose in his throat and was swallowed again. He felt odd, detached. Adrift. As though he were looking down on himself from outside. The pain and nausea felt far away, more like a memory of something long passed than something real.

Drip, drip, drip.

His mind was fractured and confused. He could feel something digging at him, coiling, pressing, burrowing its way through the parts of him that made him him. Some part of him wanted to gibber in panic, another part cheered at the freedom offered by oblivion. Mostly, he felt nothing more or less than a sublime disinterest, a sleepy sort of contentment.

I may be dying, he thought, rolling the words around through his mind like an interesting flavor he hadn’t experienced before.

Drip, drip.

At first, he didn’t even hear the wet, irregular staccato. Once it registered, he tried to dismiss it the same way he dismissed the pain or the panic. Vaguely interesting perhaps, but utterly unimportant. Yet there it was again, insistent. It was a snag on the ragged edge of his consciousness, a burr on the smooth bubble of obscurity that surrounded him. Like an unreachable itch it grew more and more demanding of attention and satisfaction. It wouldn’t be ignored. It dragged at him like an anchor until finally the shield of lethargy around him burst like an overripe fruit.

A foggy kind of awareness rushed at him, and a tidal wave of sensation crashed against the raw wound that was his mind, and he flinched. A static of creaks and groans harmonized with distant sounding wet crashes and splashes that threatened to drive him mad. The rough hardness beneath him writhed and rocked, swaying crazily and without ever pausing for a moment. He clamped useless, eyes closed, and forced the thick poisonous air through his battered lungs slowly, desperately clawing for control.

Ship.

The word burst through the harried maelstrom of thoughts and he clung to it like a raft. Yes. A ship. He had been on a ship, he was on a ship now. That was what those sounds meant. The biting pressure at his wrists and the metallic tinkling as he shifted meant something as well, and it was nothing good.

Manacles.

He was a prisoner. That was why he hurt, why he couldn’t move.

A crimson flash exploded before his eyes, and Nicholas screamed. Something sharp bit into his forearm. Man, or beast? He didn’t know, but whatever it was bit deep and tore as it went. He felt it scrape bone, felt the warm wet run of blood.

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