The first thing Atheline properly registered after opening his eyes was the sky.
It was blue, painfully ordinary and almost offensively peaceful after everything he had just witnessed.
Thin clouds drifted above him while the afternoon sun warmed one side of his face, and somewhere nearby he could hear the distant cry of a dragon moving through the mountains.
For several long seconds he remained exactly where he was, lying against cold stone and staring upward while his mind struggled to accept that he was back on Dragonic Island.
His hand slowly moved to his chest. His heart was beating.
There was no poison burning through his veins, no broken body lying on a road in another world, and no battlefield filled with the corpses of everyone he'd known.
There was only the steady rhythm beneath his palm and the familiar circulation of Aether through his body, yet something else was there.
Atheline frowned.
