Pain.
Silence.
I’d never had both at the same time before.
The roar was gone, but so was the flicker deep within me. The one that had always been there.
There was only reaching, grasping darkness. Thick, thick darkness that clung and sucked and pulled, and I couldn’t break free. It was dragging me under.
Somewhere far away, as distant as thunder all the way across the mountains, was a murmur of voices … a stroke of a hand on my cheek … a trembling memory almost too weak to be recalled of faces I wished to see.
Something entered the darkness, a sudden light that snaked through it, searching, reaching … but there was nothing for it to grasp, nothing for it to cling to, no way for it to take hold of me and bring me back.
It searched, it reached—
And I slipped further into the deep.