open to members of House Pryor
location: a secure place to recover
notes: still in valtolia until he's safe for transport - as per mother's orders
The world returned to him in pieces. He'd been in and out but it was the same each turn - barely cognisant, only slightly aware. Weak from the healing, groggy from the medicine, and fractured from the assault. First came the dull throb of pain in his gut, spreading outward like ink in water. Then, the heavy scent of herbs and burned magic clinging to the air, sharp against the back of his throat. The quiet hum of a ward, the distant murmur of voices beyond the door.
Iskander's body felt foreign, stiff and leaden, like it had been stitched back together wrong. He tried to move and was met with a lance of pain so sharp it stole his breath, his fingers clenching into the blankets beneath them.
The maze. It had been dark - so dark. His breath loud in his ears, heartbeat hammering in his skull. A turn, a flash of steel, a sharp, sickening pressure. Again. Again. Again. Again. Then nothing.
The cold ground beneath him. The warmth of his own blood spilling across it, soaking into the fabric of his clothes. Iskander's fingers, trembling and slick, pressing weakly against the wound as if he could keep himself together by sheer force of will. His breath, shallow and uneven, curling white in the night air. And the shape - moving away.
He had always imagined his death would come like this. Quiet. Cold. Not with the fury of battle or the bellow of heroism, but with the slow, creeping realization that his end fell like a sullen whisper. Unimportant and forgettable. Fitting. The young Bergian had survived the war only to bleed out in a dark corner of the world, discarded like a piece of something broken, something spent.
Iskander remembered tussling with the boy on the wall years prior, throwing him back and then watching him tumble down cobble stairs - red, gray, and broken at the bottom. Blood on the ground. His blood now. Seeping into the cracks of a place meant to stand for peace. This celebration of unity, of a war finally laid to rest, of kingdoms clasping hands instead of crossing swords. And yet, here he was, bleeding out in the dark, left for dead by a figure who had not so much as spared him a second glance. For what? A message, maybe. A warning shot. The Bergian would leave the why to greater minds, for now he'd settle his thoughts bitterly. Jaded.
His eyelids felt heavy, the world swimming as he forced them open. Candlelight flickered against the walls. And then - a figure. Someone was there. Iskander's breath hitched, something primal curling in his chest. His vision blurred, then sharpened, uncertainty creeping in like cold fingers down his spine.
“…Who - ” His voice was raw, he couldn’t trust his own mind as it shifted from past to present to the past again- but this Bergian was someone the second born would know the shape of in any dark passage, any nightmare. "Who was it?"
