Restart Again: Volume 1 by Adam Scott (pocket ebook reader TXT) 📕

taken away again.” The sadness and bitterness deep down started to rise up, as it always did when I thought about it. “I left her behind...I lost her.”

Lia squeezed my hand lightly. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” I squeezed her hands back. “I think that losing someone like that, though...it changes you. I can’t be who I was back then anymore. I gave away that piece of who I was, and I never got it back. I hope...I hope that Amaya still has it.”

I felt Lia nod. “She does. She would never let that go.”

There was a hard lump forming in my throat. I nodded silently, unable to speak without losing the internal fight with my emotions. Eventually, I felt in control enough to whisper, “Thanks, Lia.” I pulled her back against me tightly, steadying myself with the close embrace. It had been a long time since I had been in such close physical contact with another person, and as much as I had convinced myself I didn’t need it, I knew now that I had been missing it dearly.

As I laid in the darkness with Lia wrapped up in my arms, I felt a small wave of relief in the back of my mind, like I had finally removed a particularly annoying splinter and stopped the incessant itch. I nuzzled my face through her hair, resting my forehead against the back of her neck, and let out a satisfied sigh. After years of loneliness and anger, I finally felt connected to something again. I fell asleep in mere moments to the rhythmic rise and fall of Lia’s chest, a soothing metronome I hadn’t heard for a lifetime.

***

13. PREPARATION

The pain was everywhere. I screamed, but no sound escaped my lips. The blackness rushed down my throat, filling my lungs with the choking embrace of more torment. The sensation robbed me of all conscious thought, but even still, a small idea played at the edges of my mind, unbidden. This was familiar. The pain, the darkness, the empty void of nothing. Had I been here before? As my body seemed to burn away into black smoke, completing my transformation into formless agony, the memory rushed back to me all at once.

This was the second time I had entered the void. It was a defence mechanism of my brain, maybe, that had locked away the memory of the pain before. Perhaps it chose to forget, cutting out any thoughts of it root and stem, to protect me from living in constant fear of whatever this place was. Whatever had happened, the memories had come back, and somehow, it made the experience more bearable.

Though the torture was still an all-encompassing field around me, it had less of a hold over my mind this time. I could think, and one singular thought anchored me to sanity: There is relief, somewhere on the other side of the void. Whether it would last for ten seconds or ten thousand years I couldn’t say, but I had done it once before. I could do it again.

Another memory bombarded me, taking complete hold of my mental bastion. Amaya. Alderea. All of the things that had happened to me since my first trip through the blackness played out in front of me as I burned. I didn’t have the capacity to feel anything about the memories; that part of my brain was well occupied with screaming in utter agony. But the memories were coming back, and I knew that it was important. When the world changed to howling winds and flashing lights, I knew the transition was almost complete.

All of my physical senses came back to me at once, and I collapsed down to my knees immediately. Touching a hand to my chest I felt that the cool, sticky blood was still there, splashed across my leather chestpiece and arms. My gloves were torn, and a stinging in my left eye told me my forehead was still sliced open. None of it seemed to matter as my mind raced through the last memories of Alderea.

“Amaya!” I screamed out into the dark winterscape around me. The night sky was covered in clouds, leaving little illumination to aid in identifying landmarks around me. “Amaya! Jarut! Kel!” Even though I knew they weren’t here, I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself. “AMAYA!”

I crumpled forward into the snow, blood and tears streaming down my face. I couldn’t reconcile my memories of where I had just been with where I was now, which left my mind in a useless state of shock. My body was shaking, not equipped in the slightest for cold temperatures, and my fingers had already started to go numb. I just shook my head into the snow, wailing down at the ground. “I’m not leaving you, Amaya...You’re going to be okay...I promise…”

The wind was blowing steadily across the snowy plains, mounding up fresh precipitation on top of me as I laid motionless. All at once my body gave up and I gave a sigh of relief as I sank further into the snow. “Amaya...I’ll be right there...You’re going to be okay…” My vision began to narrow, but I wasn’t concerned; sleep seemed welcome to my weary mind. “I’m not...leaving you...” The last thought I had before I fell unconscious in the snow was Amaya’s face, smiling back at me.

---

I awoke to the sound of footsteps creaking on the wooden floor outside. Sleepily, I raised my head to check out the noise, doing my best to shake Lia’s long black hair out of my face. The door handle was slowly unlatching, and as it pushed open, I saw Marten and Hana’s faces peering into the room through the small crack. They must have seen me staring at them, because they quickly withdrew, closing the door and shuffling away from the bedroom.

Still groggy, I lay back down into the bed, quickly forgetting why I had even woken up. I gave Lia’s hand a small squeeze as I pulled her in close, readjusting