Shroud of Shadows

Promises

No. It wasn't blood. It was the briny, amniotic soup Mist passed off as a healing tonic I could taste in my mouth. I opened my eyes and saw that a thin white cloth covered my eyes soaked in cold water.

Had I survived? Were the voices I heard real after all? Did Oscar and Kieran yet live? Did they muster reinforcements?

My mind overloaded with uncertainty and with my senses restored with searing intensity, I thrashed upon the bed. The feeding tube had come loose and I was drowning in the filth.

In mere moments, trained hands undid the belt straps and removed the feeding tube. I rolled over off the bed, sprawled out on all four coughing up this potion that had saved my life and kept it tethered to the world. My eyes looked up into the eyes of my healer. I could scarcely believe what they were telling me. "Mist?" I wheezed out with a weak voice.

Mist looked down upon me, and fashioned a warm smile. "Knight Commander, welcome back to the world of the-"

"You're alive..." I asked and cut her off mid-sentence. I staggered as I got to my feet. I was sweating with the intense biological rigors my body had just undertaken, and a little unsteady. Mist went to assist me, but my outstretched palm held her back.

"And so are you, Geoffrey. You were badly injured and had just this-"

"Injured? Where?" I interrupted her for a second time. "Here in the Castle of Melior?" Something wasn't right. An odd sense of recollection, a very mortal experience described as deja vu, that which is 'seen already', was affecting me. I remembered the chronometric device utilized by the assassin. I recalled how it had slowed time for a moment and wondered if I was somehow trapped within it.

"Volus." Mist's expression turned into an upset frown and began to run her staff over my body, as if it could tell her the reason for my sudden distemper. She shook her head and placed her spare hand under her chin. "You were struck down on Volus three weeks ago in fact. You have just this moment come back to consciousness." I heard cooing in the background and her smile came back. "It seems Elena welcomes you back as well."

I gazed around the shadows of the hospital. It was much as I remembered it from what I thought was real. But there were no shrouds of shadows, no darkness that hid monsters. Still, this wasn't right. "I was... drowning."

Mist's face became abruptly contrite and she bowed her head. "Apologies, Knight Commander. Your feeding tube came loose towards the end of your coma. You appeared to be an experiencing some form of a night terror, it is not uncommon. So close to revival, I could not adjust or replace the reed. It was like that for but a few seconds."

I shook my head, skeptic of it all. "But... it is impossible."

Mist held out her hands in a gesture that pointed to me and then to the entire room. "You are here. You are back with us once again." I scowled, and she rolled her eyes. "What is your name?"

"MY name?" I asked in a bothered tone. I was wounded on my side, not the head.

"Yes. What is it?" She asked patiently.

"Geoffrey of Delbray. I am still a master of my sense, Mist." I responded.

"You do not seem it." Another apparition appeared. Renning came forth from the shadows, just as he had before.

"Renning. I saw you fall." I said the words slowly, it sounded like Renning but I was unsure of it. That was his armor, the cloak around his shoulders, the sword at his side. It was unmistakably him.

The veteran commander held out his hands to me, as physical testament to his tangibility. "I am standing before you know, Geo." He unlocked his helmet from his head and placed it in the crook of his arm. "Son." He came over to me and placed his hand upon my shoulder firmly, but gentle at the same time. This aged and scarred veteran was trying to comfort me as a father would to his son.