Inciting Events

Chapter 14

Brynleigh Pasternack

Brynleigh hugged her pillow tighter when she woke up, not wanting to get out of bed. However, knowing that she had to get to training, she carefully opened her eyes. Mentally preparing herself for the light but was confused when there was only a dim sliver of light coming from near her front. Coming to the quick realization that she wasn’t in her own bed, she whipped her head up to look around. As the large fort slowly came into view, she remembered what had happened the previous night and chuckled to herself, thinking of their shenanigans. She put her head back down.

In a more awake state of mind, she quickly realized that what was laying was most definitely not a pillow. Peering up to see what was under her, she found herself blushing because it wasn’t a what but rather a who.

Cyrus was still sleeping peacefully, his cheating slowly rising and falling. He looked a lot more peaceful right then. He wasn’t usually very calm when he was awake. Most likely because of what had happened in his life over the past couple of years. Though, he wasn’t this calm even when sleeping, for the most part. Brynleigh subconsciously visited a short and small memory from the other night.

Brynleigh was awoken to the weird feeling of the ground moving up and down fast. She sat up to see what was happening and found that it was Cyrus she had lying. She didn’t recall falling asleep like that, but that was besides the point. His chest was moving up and down quickly as his breaths were heavy, and he mumbled small words under his breath that she couldn’t quite hear.

She bent down closer to him and strained her ears to try and get even just a singular word of what he was saying. There still wasn’t much that she could salvage, but she heard whimpers and remnants of the words ‘get off’ and ‘stop’. She still wasn’t absolutely sure what was happening, but she knew it was a nightmare and she could guess what it was about. If what Magnus had told them held any weight of truth. Although she would usually doubt him, this was a matter not even he would joke about.

Brynleigh found herself confused and helpless as to what to do in this situation. Her father had told her growing up that a hug could fix or cure anything, but what if that only reminded him of being held down. Her brother would want a shoulder to cry on, but Cyrus wasn’t crying. He was just in an endless cycle of reliving one of the worst memories of his life. Her old friends might’ve wanted her to tell an adult, considering she had been seven the last time she saw them. But there were no adults around to help them now. They were on their own except for each other. Another hero might’ve asked to spar and blow off some steam with her, though she doubted he needed to fight right now. So, she sat there shaking and panicking as someone whom she had come to care about very dearly was fighting for their life while asleep.

Cyrus was becoming a bit more active in his dream. He began throwing his hands in the air as if he was actively trying to shove someone off of him. He was getting more and more riled up by what he was experiencing and when Brynleigh looked over to the others it appeared that their sleep was a bit disturbed but that none of them were about to wake up to help her, to help him.

She still wasn’t sure what to do, and everything only seemed to get worse. She thought that maybe she could comfort him, but she came to the realization that the only way to help him as of right then was to wake him up.

She pressed her hands down on his shoulders and began to painstakingly shake him despite how much she didn’t want to have to do it. Cyrus’s eyes opened after a little while of the hard shaking, and he pushed her hands off of him, retreating a bit and crawling backward. He looked up at her with broken and glassy eyes, so she tried to pull him nearer to her, to maybe console his wounded mind just in the slightest, but he didn’t want that right then. He continued to push her away.