This is not treachery.
This is freedom.
In the middle of Heaven and Hell, the days of rain and mist are long gone. Now, the Gap World is a kingdom of light and darkness, goodness and evilness, sunshine and clouds. When clandestine forces weave toget...
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SOMETHING WAS WRONG.
Maybe the ceaseless fear that something bad had happened---or would soon happen---was the result of me being alert and preparing myself for the next tribulation all the time. It could also be my intuition desperately trying to warn me about something. I'd learnt the hard way to never be certain for anything in life. Keeping this in mind, I could label these thoughts as paranoid and move on with my morning. But I'd also promised myself to never be foolish enough to ignore what my magic, my body and my heart were screaming at me.
Someone would think that being aware of life's uncertainty and still acknowledging the importance of having trust in yourself would be beneficial. It wasn't. I still couldn't decide if I should panic and run to the capital, or stay in the countryside until I was sure every threat here was eliminated.
As usual, Amanda had risen up from the dead a weak after I'd sent her there. It seemed to me that even death couldn't stand her and that was why she always came back. At least, that was what I kept telling myself to ignore the possibility of her being able to manipulate something as eternal and forceful as death.
Shaking my head, I tossed the bowl with the fruits to the side, which earned me a confused look from Normant.
He was sitting across from me, both of us taking our breakfast in silence. Well, he was taking breakfast. I was just staring out the window, wondering if there would come a day that we would all be sitting around this exact table with nothing to lose and nothing to fear. Today was not that day.
A platter of milk, biscuits and honey sat between us, but I didn't touch any of those. Even at the thought of eating something, my stomach tumbled.
"You're stressed," Normant noted as he stood up, taking his empty plate with him.
My reply was a humorless laugh.
We'd been up all night. It'd been like that for weeks now. We'd been visiting every village in the mountains to make sure that Amanda had kept her word and hadn't been hurting my people despite me having included her in the court. Damn. I still couldn't accept the way I'd been defeated; I still couldn't forgive myself for not finding a way to spare the people in the mountains from Amanda's threats without fulfilling her desires. At least now they were free. No one had been in that kind of paralyzing state of mind for over a month now. That was great. That was the only thing keeping me sane.
