Chapter 166

• Lusia
• As darkness settled in on me, heavy and oppressive, it blurred the sounds of the battlefield. Blood, silver, Dane's protective growl, into a distant pantheon of despair. I felt my body as a broken vessel: bruised and aching, clothed in the cold mud of a torn border.
• My heavy eyelids slowly parted, forming the world into a blurry visage, as if gazing through panes streaked with rain. Above me, sage, chamomile, and something sharper—somewhere between crushed nettle, wafted in my nose for grounding. I lay on coarse linen in a small, stone-walled, coolly damp room, only lit by a lantern whose golden glow flickered above the low ceiling.