Chapter 214: This Bleeding Grief

Eleonore’s POV

I felt my skin humming a tune I could tell. I didn’t know where it came from, which pore this feeling always seemed to leak from—whether it were the holes in my eyes, my ears, my nose… but I felt the vibrations of it as it fell from my body.

When I was younger I would spend hours, days even if I were truthful in my admittance, believing that the linking between me and all else around me had blurred—the world seemed like it, anyway. Blurred and desolate. The world was dulled for so long after all that had happened that for some days I wouldn’t eat or sleep, and I found myself walking through the mage’s gardens and through the house’s halls and thought of my parents.

People who looked like me, walked like me, breathed like me… Bastian would often find me in the lake nearest to the house, my entire body submerged up until my chin.

It’ll pass, he had said. Whatever it was that seemed to overcome me during those cobwebbed days would pass.