He woke on the floor of the mine.
Markus was still walking toward the entrance, his back turned, leading the horses. The saddlebag with the mana stones hadn't shifted.
Kaelen pushed himself up. His palm ached. The black crystal shard was gone absorbed, maybe, or hidden beneath his skin. But he could feel it there, a cold weight in his blood, a second heartbeat that did not belong to him.
"Markus," Kaelen said.
The guard turned. "My lord?"
He had not noticed anything.
"Nothing,"
Markus frowned, he hesitated. "Are you unwell? I can call a carriage for you."
Kaelen looked at his hands. No dust. No bone fragments. No evidence of the two days he had spent running through a field of the dead, dodging shadow armies, clutching a sphere that had seared its purpose into his mind. He was gone for just a second.
Alot happened but nothing happened at the same time.
In the original novel, the protagonist had never found this place.
Sovereign lost, the same thing that brought him here.
Markus was still looking at him.
"I'm fine," he said, and his voice was steady. "Let's go home, I will be fine."
,,,
He was not fine
That night, Kaelen learned that gaining the Sovereign's fragment did nothing for saddle sores.
He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, the amber stone still warm against his collarbone. The rest of him was agony.
His thighs felt like they had been flayed, stuffed with hot coals, and then sewn back on backward. Every muscle from his hip to his knee had been twisted into a single, screaming knot. When he shifted, barely an inch,a fresh spike of pain lanced through him, so sharp he saw colours that did not exist.
He had ridden for one day. One.
He had flopped and bounced and gripped with his knees like a dying man clinging to a cliff edge, and now his muscles were exacting their revenge.
He tried lying on his side. Worse. His thighs pressed together and burned.
He tried lying on his stomach. The mattress pushed up against his groin and he made a sound that was not quite a whimper.
Sprite, curled on the pillow beside his head, opened one yellow eye. The beast let out a tiny, judgmental chirp.
"Don't," Kaelen muttered.
Sprite chirped again, louder, and burrowed under the blanket to lie across Kaelen's stomach. The weight was small but warm. It did nothing for his thighs.
The system flickered, unhelpfully:
[Passive: Cold Resistance – Active]
[Note: This does nothing for blunt-force muscle trauma. Recommend light stretching and a hot bath. Neither is currently available at this time.]
Kaelen closed his eyes.
He thought about nothing at all, because the pain in his thighs blotted out everything else.
Sleep, when it finally came, was fitful and full of dreams where he was still on the horse, still bouncing, still dying by inches.
He woke at dawn with legs that had turned to wood and a new, and a resolve to never ride a horse.