Chapter 128: Trapped in a Vision - Riven's POV

Three days.

She had been out for seventy-two hours, give or take. The image of her collapsing into my arms at the bottom of those stairs haunted me. I had looked at her pale face, trying to wake her, but she wouldn’t, then carried her up the stairs and laid her on the bed.

My father, along with others, had flooded the room. All I could do was sit on the edge of the bed, right by her side, holding her hand. I kept waiting for her to open her eyes, but she never did.

The only thing that was going for her was she was breathing. Every time the demon started pressing at the edges of my control, wanting to be free, I told myself she was…stable.

Stable wasn’t dying. Stable had hope.

It didn’t mean she was here, though.

I sat in the chair beside her bed now, looking at her, then turning toward the window. Early morning light was streaming in. When I turned to look at her again, she looked smaller than she should have.

That kept getting to me. Even before the basement, even before she collapsed, she had been way too thin. Her collarbones sat too close to the surface. Her wrists felt more angular than they should have when I took her hand in mine. I thought back to when her parents came right after it happened with Sabine. Her sister had looked at her stomach with an expression that rattled me.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum where the demon had been moving all morning in that low, restless way it moved when it wanted my attention without quite pushing for control. Like something pacing. Like something that knew I was distracted and was deciding whether to take advantage of it.

He told me that she had found something. That the book was the reason she wasn’t waking up.

Blasted book. I glanced at it then. Against my father’s wishes, I had opened it yesterday, trying to see what had happened to her, but I couldn’t understand a word on the page. All of it was written in a language I didn’t understand, and neither could he. Nothing happened, though, like he said it would.

I glanced back at Callista’s face, wishing her eyes would just flutter open and I could finally breathe again.

Suddenly, there was a knock on the door, jerking my attention to it. “Come in.”

My father stepped inside. He glanced once at the book, then looked at Callista.

“No sign?”

“None,” I said simply.

His gaze found the book again. He was afraid of it, for whatever reason. It didn’t seem real. The Alpha King, with all his years, all his resources and all the ruthless patience he applied to every problem he encountered, was afraid of a book.

It made me wonder what was truly in it, though he claimed to not know everything. The summoning was all he told me.

She found something, the demon said again, and this time his voice carried satisfaction.

"Stop," I whispered.

My father looked at me with a straight face. “He’s bothering you, isn’t he?”

“Always,” I said, my voice low. “With her like this, it’s worse.”

I reached forward and adjusted the blanket at her shoulder, a motion that had no purpose since the blanket hadn't moved, but my hands needed something to do and this was the thing they kept returning to.

He nodded once, then moved to stand near the window, the way he normally did. His hands were clasped behind his back.

"The healer believes she may be in a vision state," he said, his voice barely audible. "Seers have been known to go into a comatose state when they are having visions.”

"I know," I murmured. "You told me yesterday."

"I'm telling you again because I want you to understand the distinction matters," he stated plainly. "She isn't hurt. Her body is maintaining itself, so whatever is happening is happening in her mind."

"Her mind is part of her," I said flatly. "If something is happening in it that she can't wake up from, she's hurt."

Ronan said nothing to that.

"What did the healer say this morning?” I asked, my voice hesitant.

"Her vitals are unchanged. She's still—"

"Stable," I finished. "I know."

He was quiet for a moment. "The academy has been asking after you both."

"I don't care."

“The petition from some of the alphas is active,” he said carefully. “Your main challenger has filed for an expedited one—”

"I said I don't care." My voice came out flat and final. "Unless that petition requires me to appear in the next seventy-two hours, it doesn't exist right now."

He was silent for a moment. “It doesn’t. That’s the only good news.”

"Then we're not talking about it."

He accepted this with a nod and was quiet for long enough that I thought he might leave. Then he said, "Has the demon been manageable? I know you said he’s worse, but—”

I looked at the window where he stood and one look silenced him. "Define manageable. If I told you he’s worse, then I’m barely hanging on by a thread.”

"Riven."

“You should never have done this to me,” I whispered. “Raze and I were innocent children. Now, my fated mate, is in a vision because of that blasted book while my demon keeps trying to tell me things.”

"What things?"

"That she found something." I looked back at Callista's face. "It said she's living it. Whatever the book told her to do, she's doing it from inside the vision."

Ronan went very still.

"You know what that means, don’t you?” I asked, my voice hollow.

He exhaled slowly through his nose. "There are records of seers being pulled into living visions, which are beyond the normal visions the healer thought she was in. They're not common. They require a significant amount of power from an external source to initiate." He paused. "The book would have had to recognize her seer ability and assess it as sufficient before it initiated the process."

"It chose her," I admitted.

"Yes."

"That means it can tell the difference between a seer who can handle what's in it and one who can't."

"Yes."

"And it decided she could."

"Yes," Ronan said again, and his voice had shifted into something that wasn't quite reassuring."She isn’t in danger from the vision itself. The book wouldn't initiate the process with someone it assessed as unable to survive it."

I looked at him. "You're very certain about the motivations of a living magical record that you’re afraid of.”

"I've been studying it for fifteen years," he said slowly. "I have reasonable confidence and I know it’s not for me.”

"You also had a reasonable confidence about a number of other things that turned out to be more complicated than you accounted for,” I snapped.

He held my gaze. "Yes," he said simply. "I did."

I turned back to Callista. The demon stirred again, restless. I reached up, pressing my hand against my sternum again, begging for him to go back.

"The book," I mentioned. "What's in it that she would need to live through rather than read?"

"I believe," Ronan said carefully, "that it contains the full experiential record of the original summoning. Not just the terms and the language. The actual event. What was done and how and—" He stopped.

"And what it felt like from inside the vessel," I finished.

The room was quiet.

"She's experiencing the original summoning," I hissed. "From inside it. So she can understand the full structure of what was done and find the thing that undoes it."

"That would be my assessment, yes."

I thought about Callista in whatever place the book had taken her, navigating something that had been designed by a person who probably didn’t understand what they were even summoning. And she was in it all alone, finding her way through it.

Something tightened in my chest that wasn't the demon.