CW: Anxiety attacks/ Trauma/ Blood & Gore 

 The first traces of fear was a cold caress on his neck. Lulling him in its arms and dragging his weight under. He slipped, Asael sat up. There was something here, listening, watching, drawing closer, behind him. He reached out, to pull the lamp to his side. Yet something wrapped around him, tender then scraping, peeling the flesh of his fingers. 

Heaving he fell forwards, beneath him the bed swelled into tender blue feathers, slippery and wet with blood. The winter bird convulsed, its throat severed. Its executioner lingered just past a line of trees. Asael blinked. He was in the Drugan warship, he remembered Lilia, and Sarel and Ara. He was safe. He sat upon a bed, he had seen the aides, he had bathed. And no one had looking for him.

A slow thumping bubbled in his ears, drumming, shattering. He slipped again yet beneath him now was a sloping forest, an abyssal valley, he grasped at the ground and took a fistful of grass in his hands. 

Yet he kept falling, until his back slammed against cold bark. Asael fell to his knees and rubbed his eyes furiously. It could not be, he had just been in bed, he had been safe, how could he come back to this night? Or had he never escaped? Had death brought him back again to this terrible nightmare? Had it all been a hopeful delusion? 

The thundering rain swallowed his cries. “ Please please please” he pleaded, yet the executioner pinned him down tearing into his chest and grasping the life within.  

There was no lamp beside him, or bed neath him. His body grew cold upon the border forest and for a long night he bled, over and over and again to death.