Rohan came back to himself slowly, the way a person surfaces from a dream they can't quite remember falling into.
For a long moment there was nothing at all — no void, no static, no fracturing dark, no cold, patient voice cataloguing his every response. Just a grey, formless blankness, and somewhere within it, distantly, the murmur of voices he couldn't yet place.
Then sound returned properly, all at once, and with it, light.
He blinked hard against a brightness that stung, his vision swimming, his thoughts sluggish and disconnected in a way that made even simple recognition feel like wading through something thick and resistant. His head ached. His mouth was dry. For several seconds he could not have said where he was, or how he had come to be there, or even — with a rising, formless unease he didn't yet have words for — who exactly he currently was.
What happened? Where —
