Unsound

This is a continuation of Ciori’s story, which began with Recruits. The events preceding this snippet can be found in a previous post, A Thousand Threads.

“Wake up. The priestess is here to pray for you.”

The voice came to her, faint and distant like something spoken in a dream. Ciori shifted where she lay, trying to make sense of it. Wake up? She wasn’t sure that she’d even been asleep. Or perhaps this was sleep: when she opened her eyes the room blurred around her and when she struggled to sit up, her head spun. She was caught in some strange, unsettling dream.

“Where—” she asked, but words would not slip past the painful dryness in her throat.

Someone knelt beside her and, one hand supporting the back of her neck, brought the edge of a bowl to her lips. “Here.”

Ciori drank gratefully. The water washed the leaden feeling from her tongue but it did nothing for the fog over her eyes. She tried to focus on the person beside her to no avail. 

A man’s shoulders. Skin dark like hers, darker hair, calloused hands. “Borian?” Ciori murmured. She reached for him as he moved back, but cold metal around her wrists jerked her off balance. The man caught her before she crashed to the flagstones.