Chapter 102. The Mind Catches Up to Terrible Things Too
Catherine sat cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, the wooden planks biting into her knees through her leggings. A single candle flickered on the bedside table, its flame dancing erratically in the draft, casting long, skeletal shadows that writhed across the walls like living things.
She focused on the rhythm of her pulse, a frantic, rapid-quick hammering in her throat, and tried to summon the ancient breathing patterns her mana instructor had drilled into her more than a decade ago.
Back then, it had been a tool for composure: a way to steady a trembling hand before an exam or to quiet a racing mind before a mission briefing.
Tonight, she wasn’t seeking composure. She wasn’t seeking peace.
She was preparing for war, a war against her own mind. She was reaching for the rusted bolt she had slammed shut eight years ago, intending to tear it off its hinges.
’Don’t flinch,’ she commanded herself, her teeth gritted. ’If you flinch when you see it again, you’ll never come back...’
’You have to go all the way down...’
’You have to see the blood...’
’You have to see their faces...’
William had gone downstairs moments ago, granting her the solitude she had demanded with obvious reluctance. She could hear the faint, rhythmic creak of a chair somewhere below the deliberate, controlled sounds of a man who knew how to occupy space without intruding.
His presence was a tether, a ghostly anchor in the real world, letting her know that if she drowned in the past, someone would be there to haul her back to shore.
’He thinks he can protect me from this,’ she thought bitterly, closing her eyes. ’But he can’t fight ghosts...’
’He can’t parry a memory...’
’This is my dungeon, and I’m going back in alone...’
"Inhale," she whispered to the empty room, her voice barely audible over the crackle of the wick. "Hold..."
"Exhale."
"Hahhhhh..."
She forced the air into her lungs slowly, painfully, each inhale drawn out longer than felt natural, each exhale pushed out with a deliberate, grinding patience. The candlelight behind her eyelids softened into a dim, pulsing orange glow.
Gradually, the familiar sounds of the house, the settling of old timber, and the distant, muffled murmur of the city outside began to recede. They became distant echoes, unimportant noises from a life that felt increasingly like a dream.
’Focus on the mana,’ she told herself. ’Let it flow...’
’Don’t fight the darkness...’
’Let it pull you...
Her breathing slowed further, becoming shallow and mechanical. The edges of her consciousness began to fray, the present moment dissolving like salt in water.
Her heart rate dropped, but the dread in her stomach only intensified. The darkness behind her eyes wasn’t empty; it was beginning to thicken, taking on a viscous, oily texture.
’Here it comes,’ she thought, a cold spike of terror piercing her chest. ’The pressure...’
’The smell of copper and wet stone...’
’God, please... let me be strong enough to remember...’
A phantom chill swept through the room, though the windows were closed. The orange glow behind her eyelids flickered and died, replaced by an absolute, suffocating blackness.
Then, the first sound pierced the silence: not the creak of a floorboard, but something wet. And it was something tearing.
The unmistakable sound of bone snapping under immense pressure.
Her lungs seized. Her heart gave one violent, terrified lurch.
The room vanished, and the bedroom vanished as well. Following this, the safety of the academy vanished.
Suddenly, she found herself in an entirely different place.
...
The blackness didn’t last. Instead of the expected horror, the darkness began to dissolve, not into light, but into color and texture so vivid they felt more real than the wooden floor beneath her.
The suffocating weight of the present evaporated, replaced by the warm, honeyed glow of a sun she hadn’t felt on her skin in nearly a decade.
She was young again. Her limbs felt lighter, less burdened by scar tissue and muscle memory honed for killing; she was small enough that the wooden practice sword in her hands felt enormous, a clumsy weight that required both hands to steady.
She wasn’t standing in a stone fortress or a blood-soaked dungeon. She was standing in the modest dirt yard behind her childhood home, a simple structure of timber and thatch that smelled of sawdust and sun-baked earth.
’God... it’s so bright,’ she thought, blinking against the sudden assault of light. ’It’s too bright...’
’Is this real? Or is my mind playing tricks on me before the nightmare starts?’
But the sensory details were too precise to be a hallucination. The air carried the sharp, comforting fragrance of rosemary and thyme from her mother’s garden along the back fence.
She could hear the distant, rhythmic tap-tap-tap of her father’s hammer from the workshop, a sound that had been the heartbeat of her childhood. Her father, a carpenter with hands calloused by oak and pine, possessed a quiet, patient temperament that Catherine had inherited without ever fully understanding the cost.
’I can almost smell the sawdust,’ she realized, a lump forming in her throat. ’I can almost hear the birds...’
’Why am I here...?’
’Why did I come back here...?’
A memory crystallized, sharp as a blade: the first time she had picked up a discarded branch and swung it with something resembling genuine form. She had been mimicking a traveling knight who had passed through their village weeks earlier, her small body twisting with an instinctive grace she didn’t yet comprehend.
She remembered her father stopping his work entirely, wiping sweat from his brow with a stained cloth, something unreadable and almost fearful crossing his weathered face as he watched her.
"Do that again," he’d said, his voice rough but not unkind.
She had obeyed, driven by that desperate need to please, to prove she could master the wooden stick. The motion had been clean—terrifyingly clean for a child—and it had been enough.
Within the month, she remembered the quiet tension in the house as her father scraped together coin he genuinely couldn’t spare to bring in Corwin, a retired soldier from the nearest town.
Corwin had been a man carved from granite and old regrets. He had taken one look at her stance, one look at how her weight shifted instinctively to maintain balance, and declared it with the blunt honesty of a man who had seen too many corpses to waste time on pleasantries.
"The girl has a gift... a dangerous one, if I have to say," Corwin held his chin. "Cultivate it properly, or it’ll kill her."
Corwin had trained her for three years before the royal scouts ever came knocking. Three years of unglamorous, bone-aching, repetitive drilling in that same small yard.
She remembered the way the sun would beat down on her neck, the way her muscles would scream in protest, and the way Corwin’s rough voice would cut through the heat, correcting her stance a thousand times without ever making her feel small for needing the help.
"Speed isn’t a gift, Catherine," his gravelly voice echoed in her mind now, as clear as if he were standing behind her. "Speed is a debt."
"You pay it back every single day through discipline!"
"If you ever stop paying it, the debt collector always comes calling. And he never accepts excuses!"
’I didn’t understand then,’ Catherine thought bitterly, a tear tracing a hot path down her cheek. ’I thought he was talking about technique...’
’I didn’t realize he was talking about survival, and... I didn’t realize the debt would be paid in blood.’
The memory shifted, flowing like water through the spaces between drills. She saw her mother humming softly while tending the herbs, the afternoon breeze carrying the scent of lavender.
She saw her father watching from the workshop doorway, pretending to be absorbed in a joint he was carving while his eyes tracked every micro-movement of her blade.
She remembered the neighborhood children gathering at the fence, whispering in awe about the ’elf girl’ who moved like lightning.
Then came the afternoon that changed everything. The heat had been oppressive, the dust rising in clouds around her bare feet.
She had been sparring with Corwin, her lungs burning, her vision blurring with sweat. Then, in one unguarded moment of perfect synchronization of mind, body, and intent, she had landed a clean, decisive touch against Corwin’s wooden practice sword.
The crack of wood against wood had sounded like a thunderclap in the quiet yard.
Corwin had frozen. Then, slowly, his scarred, weathered face had split into a rare, genuine grin that reached his tired eyes.
"There it is," he’d said, breathing hard, his voice thick with pride. "That’s the moment you stop being a student copying motions and start being a swordsman who understands them..."
"Everything gets faster from here, girl... Not because your body changes overnight, but because your mind finally catches up to what your body’s been trying to tell it all along."
’But the mind catches up to terrible things too,’ Catherine thought, the memory beginning to warp at the edges as the warmth of the sun began to curdle into something colder. ’The mind catches up to the screams...’
’The mind catches up to the smell of burning flesh...’
’And now... now it’s catching up to the truth.’