Chapter 3: My Savior
I awoke in a drunken stupor. My head was pounding and my vision was shot. I tried opening my eyes, but I only saw black. Looking seemed to annoy my head giving me further pain, so I closed my eyes. So what I could not do with sight, I did with my other senses, but they didn’t prove to be as helpful as I hoped. Scent seemed to be offline and there was a very bitter taste in my mouth. I heard all the natural sounds of the night…and someone breathing.
I felt the cold dew of the grass on my body except my head and shoulders. My head rested on something hard, but warm. Whatever it was shifted and I felt it as it twitched. My head did not like it as it gave me a sudden burst of pain. At least that let me know I was alive still.
Whatever held me felt alive. I could feel the blood rushing through it. I still couldn’t tell what it was, though. I should have been worried but I was just too tired to feel any emotion.
My mind refused to work. It chose not to remember anything that had happened. It also declined the offer of any though process to get the hell out of there. Wherever there was. It felt like a ton of bricks landed in my conscious and no amount of pushing was giving me an opening through them. Which pissed me off a little.
I tried the sight thing again and it hurt less. I didn’t see complete darkness now, only splotches in random places. The longer I looked the more splotches disappeared. It took some seconds, but my vision eventually cleared up. Tree leaves and branches crisscrossed above my head. A bird flew past me, being tailed by another. The motion was too fast for my slow eyes to track and soon they disappeared into the dark beyond more trees.
I saw that it was still night, but I couldn’t see what was holding my head up. The sky looked sad, which is the only way to describe it. The little amount of stars there was in the sky were dim. I couldn’t spot the moon anywhere in my line of sight. Fuzzy, dark clouds had gathered ominously to add to the already gloomy affect. The black was gone, but my vision was still fuzzy as hell.
I strained to twist my head. My eyes latched onto an indistinct form. Confused, I desperately wished I could get my head back in gear, but it was opposed to that.
“Leila? Leila Rose?” a deep, male voice asked. I hardly recognized the voice of a human, but three years of self-exile could do that to you. It also could make you forget a little thing called modesty, so the human could see me in all my glory. I almost didn’t realize that it said my name, but a moment later it hit me, along with huge surprise and shock. The shock helped sweep away the bricks of my mind leaving it much clearer and more room to think. A hundred questions instantly filled my mind, none with an answer I knew.
“Leila?” he asked again.
“Who wants to know?” is was I wanted to say, but what came out was a nasty bout of coughing which quickly turned into retching. Beautiful. Large, yet gentle hands turned me on my side, so I could vomit everything in my stomach onto the grass, which happened only to be water. Still that was very pleasing to the eye.
My stomach muscles contracted and cramped. I grabbed my stomach, praying for this to end. No such luck. Dry heaves took over after my system had made sure my stomach was empty, so they could make sure my vomiting hadn’t missed anything. Fortunately, it hadn’t because of the lack of food for the past couple days, so there was only water inside my stomach to begin with. Oxygen didn’t seem to want to help me out, and I was gasping for air. I struggled to control my heaves and oxygen flow at the same time.
“Don’t fight it. Let it roll through,” the man advised. He had stayed silent since my episode started. I followed his advice and it ended soon. I felt ashamed, though, that he had seen me in such a weak state. I didn’t even know who he was or why he was here. How in the godforsaken world he had managed to find me was a deeper mystery, but that he knew who I was certainly topped the cake.
