[This post is from Marin’s point of view.]
I stared after her for a few seconds before I turned back to the ravine, brooding. She wasn’t wrong about needing to collect my thoughts, but in some ways, I didn’t appreciate being left alone with them.
That could be dangerous, sometimes, and now was one of those times.
My eyes unfocused as I kept staring out over the ravine, the branches and leaves blending together into a blot of green, brown, and gray. My breathing slowed, my stomach slowly turning sour, muscles tightening painfully. I sank down to my knees, fingertips brushing the grass and dirt alongside the edge of the ravine, the power of the wards washing over me as I leaned forward into the line of them. Their touch was almost soothing—almost.
I tried to tamp down on the visions that tried to swarm up, the echoes of things I’d seen before, the things that opened up a raw ache inside of me. They piled up against a dam behind my eyes and I swallowed hard, squeezing them tightly shut even as my hands curled into fists.
Keep it together. Dammit, keep it together.
That was all I wanted—that, and not to relive those visions over again. I’d seen them enough. I knew what they told me. The last thing I needed was another distraction on the eve of what we were about to do. Besides, there was nothing else I could learn from them, not now.
Was there?