Chapter Text
Darkness pressed against her, thick and suffocating, a velvet curtain soaked in cold and rain, wrapping her so tightly she couldn’t tell where her body ended and the world began. Every breath caught on the jagged edges of her chest, wet and rattling, the sound of it scraping through her broken throat like rusted metal grinding against stone.
Pain dragged itself through her, not in sharp lines but in great, crushing waves. A grinding agony, deep in her bones, as if she were a mosaic shattered by a careless hand, the cracks spider webbing deeper with every shallow, sucking gasp. She was a body undone. A collection of broken parts barely stitched together by skin and blood.
She tried to move — please, move — but her body lay cold and inert, a carcass discarded among the rocks. Fingers numb. Legs limp. Head too heavy to lift. Even blinking felt like dragging herself through tar.
Where... where am I?
The thought, frail and wavering, rose in the storm of panic that battered against her skull. But it found no foothold, no sense to cling to — only the sick, drowning chaos of half-remembered images.
A parapet, rain sheeting down ancient stones slick as glass.
Boots slipping, a boy’s cruel laughter twisting the air.
The tilt of the world, the sky rushing up—no, down—
The sickening, wet snap of her spine as she hit the jagged rocks below.
She sucked in a breath, and it came too wet, too shallow. Blood flooded her mouth — thick, metallic, obscene — and spilled down her chin, trailing hot paths across her cold skin. She gagged weakly, the sound lost against the rising roar.
It wasn’t just the storm going on around her. It was the river and it was far too close.
She could hear it — a wild, furious thing — just feet away, unseen beyond the crooked tumble of stone and broken brambles. It thundered past her, a voice of rage and hunger, crashing over unseen boulders, slapping against the cliffs in bursts of white spray she could feel on her battered face.
One wrong shift — one slip — and it would take her. Drag her broken body down into the churning, merciless current. Smash her against the rocks until there was nothing left but blood and bone and rags.
Panic rose in her throat, thick and hot, nearly strangling her. Her heart thudded in frantic protest against the cage of her broken ribs, beating an unsteady tattoo she could feel in her teeth, in the hollow pit of her stomach.
She needed to move — had to move — but her body refused. It was a dead weight, a shattered thing left at the mercy of the river’s hungry song.
Above, the sky loomed, a bruised sheet of grey torn open by thin, needling rain. The cliffs rose high and sheer around her, walls of jagged black rock that closed in tighter with every blink, as if the world itself were folding inward to crush her. Water ran down the stone in thin, dark veins, trickling over the broken ledge she had fallen from.
Blood pulsed from her wounds in sluggish fits, mixing with the wet earth beneath her. She could feel it now — the mud sucking at her skin, pulling at her like greedy hands.
The pain sharpened and blurred at once, a dizzying, nauseating thing. She tried again to lift her hand, a twitch, a tremor — but it barely stirred the wet dirt beside her. Useless. Helpless.
Tears welled, stinging the open gash on her temple where her head had struck the stone. She tasted salt and iron, hot and metallic.
Help me, she thought.
No one answered. Only the river.
Its voice rose, the water surging higher — closer — a beast snarling for her blood.
The world tilted, swayed. She couldn’t tell anymore if it was the ravine shifting or her mind unraveling, but the cliffs leaned like drunk giants, and the river roared louder, hungry and wild.
Somewhere deep in her broken chest, beneath the ruin of muscle and splintered bone, a word surfaced — alien and yet familiar, a whisper pulled from another life:
"Basgiath."
It clung to her mind, desperate and thin, like the last breath of a drowning girl.
And then the darkness rose, thicker than before, dragging her down, as the river screamed beside her and the cliffs swallowed the sky.
This time, when it claimed her, she was too broken to even weep
-O-
Something raw and merciless was clawing through her veins, setting every nerve ending ablaze until she thought she might burn from the inside out. It wasn't a pain she could scream through — it was the kind of agony that locked her jaw, crushed her ribs, made her heart stutter and jerk inside her chest.
She tried to scream anyway. Her voice tried to claw its way out of her chest like a feral animal. Only, a hoarse, broken gasp scraped free of her throat instead.
Her back arched clean off the cold, hard surface under her. Muscles spasmed, tore, and locked. Somewhere deep inside, the sickening grind of bones snapping back into place and the wet, nauseating tug of flesh knitting over shattered marrow echoed throughout her body. Each pulse of the wretchedness twisted her further, warping her like molten glass.
There was no air. No up or down anymore. Only fire.
Dimly, a voice cut through the pain. Low. Steady. A man’s voice. Saying words she couldn’t grab onto, couldn’t understand through the deafening vociferation that filled her head like a wave of neverending agony.
"Stay with me, Violet."
"You're almost through it. Breathe."
The words slipped around her like smoke, meaningless until the name snagged. Violet. Her mind flailed harder, desperate to find something solid to cling to.
Violet? Who the hell is Violet?
The name didn't belong to her. It slid across her mind without sticking, like trying to catch water in broken hands.
She wanted to ask. Wanted to scream it at him;
I'm not her. I'm not whoever you think I am.
But her mouth wouldn't shape the words. Her tongue felt thick, her lips cracked and her throat scraped raw.
Another surge of pain lanced down her spine, a jagged bolt that finally wrung a strangled cry from her battered lungs. She bit down hard, tasting iron.
She caught glimpses — flashes — between the blinding waves of hurt.
A towering dais, half-lit by flickering torches.
Rows of people in uniform standing stiff and watchful beyond it, their faces a blur of sharp lines and even sharper eyes.
A cold wind knifing through the open space, thick with the scent of ash and blood and something older — something ancient.
Above it all, a sky scattered with unfamiliar stars, blinking down like distant witnesses to her collapse.
Slowly — torturously — the wildfire in her blood began to ebb. Not gone, not even close. But retreating, grudgingly, leaving behind a scorched wreckage. Every breath still hurt and nearly all of them were followed by a low, rattling ache. The skin on her body felt stretched; too tight, too wrong. She could feel herself again, and it was a miserable thing to endure.
A hand brushed her forehead — steady, calloused, too gentle for the violence caged within her.
"You're safe," the voice said, closer now, weighted with something she couldn’t name — relief, maybe. Or guilt.
"Gods, Violet, how the hell did you survive that fall?"
Violet.
Again.
The name twisted through her mind like a knife, lodging deeper. She didn’t know it. Didn’t know her.
But somehow... somehow it clung to her all the same, like a half-forgotten dream she couldn't chase down. Was that who they thought she was? Was that who she was supposed to be?
She wanted to laugh — or cry — but her body betrayed her again, sagging limply against the hard surface beneath her. No voice came. No protest. Just a shuddering, broken breath that scraped up from her battered lungs.
She tried again to form words, to force them past the ruined wreck of her throat, but all that came was a guttural, wet sound. The man must have thought she was trying to speak, trying to answer.
"Don't talk yet," he murmured, his hand light on her brow. "You're lucky I found you when I did. Another few hours and you'd have bled out right there on the stone."
Lucky.
Right.
If this was luck, she couldn't imagine what failure looked like.
The river's roar still echoed somewhere in the background; a reminder of how near she must have been to being swept away entirely. How narrow her miraculous escape had been.
Her eyes fluttered open for half a heartbeat — the sky overhead vast and strange, as if the galaxy itself had shifted while her eyes were closed.
Before she could wrestle a single thought into order — before she could so much as think who the fuck is Violet? again — the darkness swallowed her whole, quicker this time. She wasn’t entirely sure if it was more shitty ‘luck’ or just a curse.
-O-
The world returned slowly, like surfacing through black, viscous water, every inch an effort against some invisible weight that pinned her down.
Her body was the first thing she noticed.
Or rather, the ruins of it.
A deep, grinding ache lived in her bones, in her muscles, in her lungs that scraped thinly against each breath. It was the kind of ache that wasn’t content to sit quietly — it pulsed, it gnawed, it wore her down with every ragged inhale. Even the smallest twitch of a finger felt like a battle hard-won, a defiance against the overwhelming gravity pulling her eyelids down…down…
She lay still, every instinct screaming not to move, not to disturb whatever fragile threads were holding her together. It felt like her body was stitched from silk, delicate and precarious, one wrong breath away from tearing apart at the seams like some sort of deranged scarecrow.
So she just focused on breathing. Became aware of everything around her by smell alone… In and out, ragged and thin.
The air itself smelled wrong. Sharp and coppery – like blood, old— with the floral of herbs.
It took long minutes — it could have been hours, or even a lifetime — before she dared crack her eyes open.
Above her, a dim stone ceiling swam into view, blurred and swimming as if she were still underwater. Narrow windows, set too high for any normal room, bled slivers of pale, sickly morning light onto the rough-hewn floor. The corners of the room were deep in shadow — heavy, suffocating pools of black.
Cots.
Bandages.
Bottles and bowls lined up with grim precision.
Not a hospital.
Not home.
Not anywhere she knew.
She knew it immediately — deep in the pit of her stomach, in the primal part of her that had survived worse things than nightmares. This place was foreign, alien. It was all wrong.
Something was horribly, horribly wrong.
Her breathing hitched — a small, broken sound she couldn’t quite muffle — as she forced a trembling hand upward with monumental effort.
It didn’t look right.
Long, slim fingers. A wrist too delicate, swollen and painted in ugly purples and yellows that bloomed on too pale skin.
This wasn’t her hand. The fingernails were too prim despite all the gunk under the beds. The joints too nimble. It was like someone had cut off her own hands and sewed on someone else's like they were making Frankenstein's monster. But there was no scar, no threads weaving in and out of her skin. It was firmly attached.
A surge of nausea clawed up her throat, thick and acidic and for a few minutes, all she could hear was her own blood rushing.
Oh God. Oh God, what happened?
Memory lunged at her, a beast out of the dark:
The fall.
Sharp stone.
Rain slicking ancient parapets.
A boy’s laughter — sharp and cruel.
Pain. So much pain she thought she must have died from it.
And then — nothing.
A great, yawning nothing.
Until now.
Somewhere outside the heavy doors, something scraped sharply against stone. Voices snapped and barked orders she couldn’t understand — the language was strange, brutal, but the tone was universal.
Military.
Definitely military.
Panic locked around her chest like a vise, sharper than any pain in her ribs. Her mind scrambled, flipping through fragments she didn’t recognize:
Violet.
Basgiath.
Parapet.
None of it was making sense.
And yet — somehow — it lived inside her now. Like someone else’s memories were bleeding into hers, clashing violently with the ones she knew were real.
The door creaked open.
She froze — every muscle locking tight, her breath bottling painfully in her lungs.
A figure entered, broad-shouldered, dressed in strange, severe robes she didn’t recognize. He carried a bowl, steam rising from it in lazy curls. His dark hair was streaked with grey at the temples, his face lined with exhaustion. He didn’t look cruel. But his eyes were hard.
His footsteps were brisk, confident, unafraid.
He knew this place.
He belonged here.
It was becoming ever so clearer that she did not.
When his eyes found hers — flickering open, trembling with pain and terror — his expression softened.
"Good," he said, setting the bowl on a nearby table. "You're awake. I was starting to think you were going to sleep the week away, Violet."
That name again.
It crashed through her like a hammer blow.
Violet.
Violet.
Violet.
It wasn’t her name — she knew that. She knew that.
And yet...And yet something in the way he said it, something in the way it fit around her like an ill-tailored coat, made her want to scream.
She swallowed, the motion scraping raw against her throat, and he immediately misread it as effort.
"Don’t try to talk yet," he said firmly, but not unkindly. "You’ve been through hell. Lucky you’re alive. Luckier that no one's written your name in the archives yet."
Archives?
What the fuck does that mean?
He dipped a cloth into the bowl laced with something herbal and began gently wiping the blood and grime from her forehead. The water was warm. His movements were clinical, efficient. But there was kindness buried beneath the practiced movements.
She wanted to shove him away. Wanted to claw at him, to demand answers.
Wanted to scream Where on Earth am I? How did I get here?
But her body — this alien, broken body! — refused her.
So she lay there, rigid and trembling, as he worked. Heart hammering against cracked ribs. Terror singing through her veins.
Who is Violet?
A fresh wave of nausea rolled through her, leaving her breathless and clammy. Pain flared deep in her chest, tearing another weak gasp from her battered lungs. The man immediately hushed her, mistaking it for fatigue.
"You’re safe," he murmured. "Rest. You’ll need your strength. The Riders Quadrant waits for no one."
Riders Quadrant.
The words sparked against the fog in her brain — a flare of something too sharp, too familiar. Then another word drifted up from the wreckage of her thoughts.
Basgiath.
Her mind seized on it instinctively — too fast, too desperate — and when the pieces clicked together like broken porcelain, when the knowledge slithered out of some buried place inside her, she almost vomited.
Basgiath.
The Riders Quadrant.
From Fourth Wing, her mind supplied numbly. The book. The fucking book—
What–? What the hell was happening?-----
Her body sagged back against the cot and eyes that felt too wide slid shut against the terror clawing up her spine. It was cruel and heavy and filled with monsters she hadn’t even begun to meet.
-O-
When I woke up again, the man hovering near me — too close — was the one I belatedly realized was Nolon. The Mender.
My muscles seize before my mind catches up, tension threading through every nerve ending like a wire pulled taut. It didn’t seem to register to him how rigid I go under his hands; he’s almost too familiar with the body I now inhabit. Too used to Violet, who must have trusted him. Or at least, tolerated his proximity.
But I am not Violet. Not really. And I know exactly what Nolon will become. The same Mender who, not too long from now, would spend the better part of a year painstakingly healing a Venin — Jack Barlowe. The same Jack Barlowe who tore Violet’s life away like it was nothing more than parchment. The same Jack Barlowe who made me take her place.
Revulsion curls in my gut like a fist. I need to tell someone. I need to bring someone into the fold, someone I can trust — but it won’t be him. Not Nolon. Never Nolon.
For a desperate moment, I think about Rhiannon Matthias. Sweet, fiercely loyal Rhiannon. But almost immediately, I shove the thought aside. Violet hadn’t been close enough to her yet. Trust was still a brittle, fragile thing between them, stretched thin across first-year cadet nerves.
And even if Rhiannon wouldn’t mean to, she would tell someone. She was the type who still believed the right authority could protect her.
No.
Not her.
I think about Xaden Riorson next — the first image that leaps to mind is of those steely eyes narrowing in suspicion — eyes that I’d only ever ready about on a piece of paper— and my stomach drops.
Bodhi Duran? Garrick Tavis? Just as quickly, the thoughts are crushed under a wave of violent, instinctive horror: any one of them, catching even a whiff of what I was hiding, would not hesitate to put me down. Brutally. Efficiently.
I can see it too clearly; my body (Violet’s body) broken, bloodied, and discarded AGAIN.
Dain Aetos doesn’t even flicker across my mind as an option. Not with his signet — retorecognition — the ability to pull memories from a single touch. One brush of his hand and all my secrets would be laid bare for someone too close to the wrong people. No, staying near him would be suicide. I'd have to avoid Dain, indefinitely, or die trying.
Panic prickles cold beneath my skin as I mentally cycle through the names I remember from the books, discarding each faster than the last. My heart lurches violently, nausea cresting high, until a name drifts by, almost forgotten.
Relief surges so sharply I almost retch as the taste of bile recedes from my throat.
Him.
It has to be him.
Decision made — or as made as it’s going to get — I spotted a scribe passing through the corridor, robed in white so glaring it almost hurts my eyes. The heavy cloth hangs off his slight frame, marking him clearly as part of the Scribe Quadrant. He startles when I call out to him, clearly not expecting a girl who probably looked more like a corpse than human– to address him directly. For a second he hesitates, weighing caution, then shuffles closer.
Leaning in, I whisper my request. Barely audible. I see the way his face pinches with the visible nerves, but he nods after a moment and scurries off down the hall. And then I wait.
Hours bleed together.
The pain in my body festers at the edges of my mind, fraying my patience. Blue torches or rather, magelights — small orbs of cold, blue fire — drift lazily above the infirmary, casting long, eerie shadows that sway with every creak of the building. It’s an utterly bizarre sight. Blue fire. But it's just more confirmation about where I am now.
Twice I think about giving up. That he’s not coming. That he’s already told someone — maybe even Xaden Riorson — that a lunatic in the infirmary is summoning people like a commandant. If that’s the case, my death is already written. But if I could share what I knew before it came — even if it cost me everything — then at least it wouldn’t all be for nothing.
Gritting my teeth against the agony, I forced myself to move. I swung my legs off the cot, nearly sobbing as white-hot pain lanced up my spine and settled like a clawed hand wrapping around my lungs. My arms trembled, barely able to support me as I clutched the thin mattress. The whole world swam around me in a dark, dizzy haze — but I was determined.
I will get up. I have to move. I want to survive. I want to live!
Then the door creaked. The sound echoed across the room. I managed to lift my head, blinking through beads of sweat dribbling down my face. Silver hair sweeps across my forehead— Violet’s hair, Violet’s face! My mind corrects as I focus on the newcomer, tears of effort blurring the way.
And there, standing framed in the low light, swathed in shadows but unmistakable, is the person I gambled everything on.