I woke up in a bed of wildflowers.

A bright blue sky hung above me. The biggest clouds I had ever seen floated like listless white giants. The sun was just warm enough to feel it on my skin without it being hot. Nothing lay to my left, only a sheer drop down to the sandy beach and sea beyond it. A tower stood on my right, its base a large wooden house with a porch that went all the way around it. The top of it was all glass and a dim beam of light swept out into the distance.

It was a lighthouse.

Had I done it? Had I actually died?

No. I thought to myself, remembering that Sam had found me.

I did not know how or when, but I was certain that I had been there before.

A sea breeze, bracing and carrying the briny scent of sea salt, blew over me.

I had been there before, but why was I there now?

A momentary memory of my mother crying came back to me. Tears brimmed in her left eye, but her right burned with white hot fury.

Where had she gone?

Where had I gone?

The sea breeze came again and left a new scent behind after it had gone. It was heavy, staying around me like a cloud, and slightly sweet.

It made my stomach turn. Some part of me screamed to find wherever the smell had come from and get as far away from it as possible.

I would have listened to that part of myself if I had been able to move. My eyes watered from the cloying sweetness, and I blinked to push them away.

Gone.

From the blue sky to the lighthouse, everything was gone, and I found myself back in the manor. All the lights were out. A dim white glow cast stark shadows over the wooden beams of the kitchen ceiling.

My whole body felt like one dull, itchy, throb.

My mother stood over me with her red hair tied back. Sweat slicked strands clung to her face and her eyes were focused on something that seemed to be taking much from her.

She met my eyes briefly.

“Anna, She is awake. Do not let her see. It will take me a moment for me to settle her back down again.” She said, her words coming serious and quick.

Let me see what? I wondered, trying to lift my head off the table.

Anna appeared opposite my mother, smiling sweetly. She ran her fingers through my hair and gently laid my head back down. “Hey, let’s drink some water.”

I unstuck my tongue from the bottom of my mouth and nodded weakly. Of course she had known I was thirsty before I had.

“Turn her head to the side, dear. And don’t let her drink too quickly, it could make her sick.” I heard my mother say.

I realized I had closed my eyes when something cold touched my lips. They parted and cool water filled my mouth. I sighed as I drank, swallowing as much as I could before it was taken away. I tried to reach out with my hand and bring it back, but my arm was too heavy.

“Get some sleep, I’ll be here when you wake up.” I heard Anna say, her hands wonderfully returning to my hair. Slightly, it was all I could manage, I shook my head against her touch. Sleep was where the smell was. I couldn’t go back. There was something dark on that hill of flowers, something horrid and evil.

“Rest, my little Delpha.” I heard my mother say softly.

My breaths slowed and the feeling of Anna playing with my hair sent me drifting off into nothing…

The bed of wildflowers wilted beneath me. The blue sky darkened into an oppressive gray. Black mist rained down all around me, obscuring my view of the sea and the lighthouse. The cloying scent filled my nose, much stronger than before. It was so thick, it felt like whatever rotting thing that was producing it was right next to me.

The ground began to shake. Through the black mist, the lighthouse's beam faded as the towering shape sunk into the ground. The house went first, collapsing into whatever dark pit had formed beneath it. Moments later, the tower was swallowed and the shaking stopped.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, and I realized I was being watched.

I forced my eyes away from where the lighthouse no longer was, and looked up to see my mother and Anna.

“-no true healer. I cannot shield her from her pain completely because without it reacting to my working, I would be lost.” My mother said from the opposite side she had been on before.

Anna stood next to her and raised a glass of wine to my mother’s lips. Without looking away from me, she drank and Anna wiped her mouth once she was done.

“Thank you, dear.”

“There are people who are better than you at this?” Anna asked her in reply.

“Many. The Mother in Blue is the best of us all.” My mother answered, wiping the sweat from her brow on the back of her forearm. Glimmering iridescent aura covered her hand. A thin tendril of ran down from the tip of her middle finger and I felt the other end of it tug against my arm dully.

I closed my eyes so they would not notice that I was awake again. No part of me wanted to return to the seaside hill, to where I was being watched.

“How much better could she be? This is already a miracle.” I heard Anna say.

A snort came from my mother. “The first time I met her, she had just returned from drowning a new sun before it could burn the world away. The sorceress that had been sent to stop it from happening had not called for The Mothers soon enough to save herself. The poor girl had nearly been incinerated and only had a moment left, but The Mother in Blue healed her with little to no effort at all. I have heard that the sorceress's skin is radiant now. What I am doing is on the surface. The Mother repaired everything from the bone up.”

“Can you do it? Is she going to be okay?” Anna said, her voice growing quiet.

“Can or cannot is a choice, dear. I will do it,” My mother’s voice grew much closer to my face. “She will be sore in some places and numb in others I would imagine, my hope is to prevent her from scaring.”

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I felt the same strange tugging sensation as the itching returned.

“Will it be like this every time?” Anna asked, nearly whispering.

“Let us hope that The Mother in Brown’s punishment shall be the worst. Now, be ready incase she wakes, this will hurt he-”

What felt like thousands of needles being pushed through the veins of my arm destroyed my ability to continue pretending to be asleep.

My eyes snapped open and I came up screaming.

My mothers colorless aura covered my body in a thin veil. Beneath it, the shredded flesh of my arms and legs bleed red through. The small patches of my pale skin that remained grew slowly outward, crawling towards each other to make a connection.

Dizzy, weak, thin. My eyes lost their focus and I fell back down, fainting before I hit the table.

Lost and spinning, my next waking moments came in flashes.

“She was just laying out there. In the grass, right off the path. The cat led us to her.” Bool spoke from somewhere out of my sight.

Arthur passed by my right side, his shirt was off and his right eye was swollen and bruised.

“They just fucking left her?” Arthur shouted.

“Shut up, Arthur. Don’t wake her up!” Anna whispered harshly from somewhere near me.

I thought I could feel her holding my hand.

Bool spoke again. “Easy, Ugi. Lady Aubrey is almost ready for us to move her.”

Somewhere between the next time the tall man paced by me and the one that followed, I was gone again.

“- and you are certain? You truly feel that way?” I heard Ms. Lao ask.

“Yes, Ma.” Anna insisted.

Ms. Lao began to ask her daughter a question. “Why did you feel you could not tell-”

The sound of her voice quieted before tapering off completely.

A soft sound, like a rain so kind it had agreed to gently crawl to the ground instead of falling onto it, was all I could hear. I opened my eyes when I began to feel the small pitter patters of the polite rain on my face.

Black mist, not courteous rain, fell from the dark sky.

I was back on the hill, laying in the bed of decaying wildflowers. The wind that blew was not the sea breeze I had felt before. It had turned into a vicious and cold thing that chilled me to my bones. So thick in the air I could almost see it, the scent of death remained, but I knew where it was coming from.

The section of ground I could see in my peripherals, where the light house had been swallowed, felt wrong to look at. Something that should not be had happened there and I felt like I would be sick.

Wake up, Autumn. Wake up! I screamed at myself in my mind, desperate to vanish from where I lay. Why. Can’t. I. Fucking. Move?

I couldn’t, but something else could. A black cloaked figure rose from where the lighthouse once stood.

The wind battered against me and then the figure loomed in the air above me. The shadows within the hood concealed its face, but I did not need to see it’s eyeless gaze to know what had found me.

“I have been watching you, child.” The lich rasped, its voice taking what little warmth I had left out of my body.

My breaths fastened and my eyes went wide. No.

It raised its arms and its billowing black sleeves fell away, revealing two hands of sharp white bone that clutched the hood and began to draw it back.

“No.” I whispered, unable to look away.

Long locks of straight black hair fell from the hood first. “You should know where your place truly is.”

Azza, it was Mother Azza. Even in my dreams I could not escape her.

“No!” I screamed. Darkness fell over me just as the nightmare hanging above me moved to show me its face. I shot up suddenly, like I had when I had seen the state of myself, and found myself alone.

The lich, mother Azza, whatever it had been was nowhere to be found.

I’m in the kitchen. That was a horrible dream. I woke up and I am back in the kitchen.

I was right about being awake, but I was not in the kitchen.

There were no wooden beams above me, only a seamless sheet of pearl pink fabric. The soft blankets and pillows underneath me had certainly not been on the table in the kitchen. I let myself fall back down and stretched the heavy sleep out of my arms and legs.

“Fuck!” I groaned, every part of me feeling tight and stiff. I was in my bed. Only, it couldn’t be my bed because it wasn’t torn to shreds and I was in it alone.

One of my feet caught on the blanket and tugged against it. That is new. I thought, running my hands over my arms and legs. When they didn’t come away covered in blood or make me scream out in pain, I sat back up and snapped the lights on. Cloaked me in pale pink light, I saw that the bloody rag I had been wearing had been replaced with a clean dress. From the bottom of my feet, all the way up to my navel, were tightly wrapped bandages. The same was true from each of my shoulders down to my fingertips. My lips were no longer cracked and bleeding. I was sore like I had never been before, but I felt nothing of the pain I had been in after my punishment.

“Good morning, Autumn.” A voice came from outside my canopy.

“Mom?” I called back, painfully crawling to Anna’s side of the bed and pulling open the curtains.

“How did you sleep?” I heard her ask before she leaned up from where she had been laying on the floor and gave me a tired smile.

My mother had changed. Like she had aged twenty years overnight, streaks of gray ran through her usually perfect hair. The corners of her eyes and mouth bore soft wrinkles that diminished the radiant beauty she normally wore with ease. Dark circles wringed her eyes and she took note of what I was noticing.

“Do not look surprised daughter, you already know the cost of healing another with your power.” She said, half heartedly raising an eyebrow.

“I don’t understand.” I answered, matching her expression.

A small smile graced the right corner of her mouth. “The Mother’s have forbidden me from teaching you about the power that sorceresses carry, just the same as they have forbidden you to step outside the manor walls. It is fortunate that you already know that healing another does not come at the cost of your body or mind, but at the cost of your soul.”

“Right,” I nodded, understanding the line that she was walking for my benefit. “I could have healed myself at any time with the knowledge I gained completely on my own.”

“Good girl,” My mother smiled at me. It could have been my eyes, they had not been very reliable as of late, but I thought I saw one of her gray streaks regain its color. “It is also fortunate that you understand how difficult it would be to explain to The Mother in Brown, if she came to look in on you, how you had recovered so quickly. It is best to keep yourself covered, both to protect the wounds that have not closed and your modesty until the proper amount of time has passed.

“Right. Being ground away by sand is not something you can recover from overnight.” I agreed.

“She did fucking what to you?” Anna shouted from beyond the closed curtain on the other side of the bed.

“Good morning, Anna.” My mother chuckled.

Anna ripped the curtain open and crawled onto the bed next to me, a smirk on her face. “I know she’s important and powerful or whatever, but I will fight her. Say the word. I’ll go right now.”

At her words, my mother fell into a deep laugh as she stood up.

I saw it again, I was certain.

Every moment she laughed, the grays in her hair brightened and the circles under her eyes faded.

I leaned back into Anna, my body too sore to hold me up any longer. “Is it also good that I understand that laughing makes you better?”

“It is good that you understand that laughing makes me better, and that it is different for each of us.” My mother corrected me, sitting on the edge of the bed. She still looked shy of her usual self, but the tired woman she had been when I had first seen her was gone.

“What will make you all the way better?” Anna asked for me, finding my words before I could say them.

“Laughing,” My mother reaffirmed. “Dinner, wine, being with those I love.”

“There is one night left of Amoranora, right? Is it one of the fighting nights or do we get to sit around and relax?” Anna asked.

“Well, yes, Adrian’s night is tonight and it is meant to be a proper masquerade. But, Autumn needs to rest. After all she has been through, she does not need to push herself.” My mother said.

“I want to.” I started, my voice breaking before I could say anymore.

Tears, wet tears, welled in my eyes and spilled over my cheeks.

They were not out of pain, fear, or anger.

Joy, care, and relief were all that drove them.

I cried because I was home.