A dull ache, deep and insistent, pulsed through every fiber of her being, pulling her from the depths of unconsciousness.
Velnorah slowly woke up.
Suddenly a soft pain spread from the center of her body outward, like tendrils of ice coiling around her bones, seeping into her very marrow.
She wasn't lying on the blood-soaked battlefield.
She wasn't buried beneath rubble and corpses, wasn't clutching the gaping wound in her abdomen.
She was in a bed.
The sensation was disorienting. Why? How?
Her eyelids felt as though they had been stitched shut, resisting her every effort to pry them open.
The dim morning light seeped through her closed lashes as a soft glow danced across her vision.
A quiet breath shuddered past her lips.
She was alive.
The last thing she remembered was pain... mind-numbing pain.
The glint of steel and the dull taste of blood on her tongue,
