In the distance, after walking a long time, Sonder spotted the dark mouth of a cave in a hillside.
Moss and vines draped its entrance, but it would do.
She pulled Vell through the tall grass and across a riverbank, water soaking her boots, until they reached the cave.
Carefully, she lowered him onto a flat patch of rock near the entrance, where the light still reached. His head lolled, eyes shut.
Sonder's hands trembled as she pressed them over his heart.
A faint glow spread, weak and faltering.
She gave some of her leftover power to him. It seemed to steady him a little, but the deep exhaustion, and whatever the Irath King had done, remained untouched.
She herself had little left to give.
Right now, magic was not enough. Not for this.
The hours blurred. She cleaned his wounds with river water, tore her cloak into strips for bandages, whispered healing spells until her throat went raw.
Sometimes she thought his pulse grew stronger. Sometimes weaker. Sometimes she thought he was slipping away.
At one point she left him, only for a moment, stepping out into the fields.
Even though she distrusted the new Irathy lands, she thought of the flowers and herbs she had seen.
She knelt and gathered what she knew. The plants came easily, their scents sharp and alive against her fingers, as though they wanted to be taken.
By the time she returned, her arms were full. She spread the herbs on the stone floor and set to work with desperate care, grinding them with a rock, boiling them over a small fire she started from branches and brush gathered by the riverbank. The mixture turned a cloudy green, pungent and bitter.
She tipped the liquid carefully to Vell's lips, praying some part of it would reach him, that the life brimming in this new land might seep into him as well.
Night fell. The world outside was quiet. Only the lonely chorus of frogs, insects, and the rustle of grass in the wind broke the silence.
She stared at Vell's face in the shifting firelight.
He looked… human. The most human he ever had.
Not the unstoppable mage who had stood against Endrith, but tired. Fragile. Breakable.
And she realized, with a sharp ache in her chest, that if she failed him here, there would be no one left.