Page 46 of Dark Night of the Soul

I didn’t move. My feet rooted to the floor. My pulse thundered in my ears.

“No,” I said. The word louder than I expected.

The scrub nurse’s eyes went wide as she glanced from me to someone behind me. Hands reached for me, clamping down on my arms.

I lashed out on instinct. A shove. An elbow to the gut. Desperation.

It bought me nothing.

A prick into the side of my neck. Cold. Precise.

The room tilted.

The last thing I heard was someone sighing.

I don’t know how long I’d been under the lights.

Time had stopped behaving the way it should—stretching, folding in on itself. My thoughts came too fast now, stacking over one another like cards I couldn’t put down. Every instinct screamed move, act, end it. I was running out of space between the scream and the doing.

This was the line.

I felt it shrinking.

A pressure bloomed behind my eyes. Not pain. Something like being overridden. A narrowing. Like the world was trying to decide for me.

And then—

The room went still.

Not silent. Still.

The machines hummed on, lights blinking, bodies moving around me but the space between moments stretched thin and sharp, like glass.

“Anna.”

The voice wasn’t in the room. It brushed that deep, dark part of me that wasn’t awake. The place between breath and action.

It was inside the pause.

I knew that voice.

My breath hitched. “Uncle?”

Cashiel stood at the edge of my vision. His white wings threaded with gold spread behind him. He was here but not. A presence on the threshold, not a body in the room. Light folded around him. His face was grave, carved from patience and regret.

“I can’t stop this,” he said.

I laughed weakly. “Figures.”

“This path is bound by mortal choice,” he continued. “I cannot intervene.”

“Then why are you here?” My heart hammered. The urge to act clawed at my skin.

His gaze softened. “Because there is still something they cannot take from you.”

The pressure surged again, sharper this time. I gasped, teeth gritting as the instinct to strike—to destroy—to finish—flooded my veins.

“What is it?” I snapped.