POV : LILITH
The darkness was different here.
Not the cold, suffocating black of the dungeon. Not the crushing nothingness of unconsciousness. This darkness was soft. Warm. It smelled like the inside of her childhood home....woodsmoke and dried lavender and something else she had no name for, something that lived only in the space between memory and longing.
It smelled like him.
It smelled like her father.
She didn't question it. She didn't try to understand. She simply walked forward, through the dark, following the scent the way a person follows a light at the end of a tunnel, not because they have chosen to, but because their soul has already decided.
He was sitting in the old wooden chair from their kitchen. The one with the cracked left leg that her mother had been meaning to fix for three years. The one he always dragged to the back porch in the evenings so he could sit and watch the sun go down over the treeline with a cup of tea growing cold in his hands.
