From time to time a horsy clippety-clopping could be heard from the hall outside. This mystery solved itself when a woman with the body of a horse stepped partway into the room. The effect was surprisingly unsurprising. She was a sturdy, sun-kissed woman with short brown hair who just happened to be attached to the chassis of a sleek black mare.

“You are conscious?” she asked.

Quentin cleared his throat. He couldn’t get it all the way clear. It was horribly dry, too dry to speak, so he just nodded.

“Your recovery is nearly complete,” the centauress said, with the air of a busy senior resident doing rounds who didn’t have time to waste rejoicing over medical miracles. She began the slow process of reversing herself, daintily, purposefully, back out into the hall.

“You have been asleep for six months and two days,” she added before she disappeared.

Quentin listened to her clippety-clop away. It was quiet again. He did his best to hang on to the blissful feeling. But it didn’t last.

The six months of his recovery were practically a blank—just a quickly evaporating impression of blue depths and complex, enchanted dreams. But Quentin’s memories of what happened in Ember’s Tomb were very clear. He might reasonably have expected that day (or had it been night?) to fall in a blackout period, or at least be veiled in merciful post-traumatic haziness. But no, not at all. He could remember it with perfect fidelity, deep focus, full force, from any angle, right up until the moment he lost consciousness.

The shock of it snapped his chest flat. It emptied out his lungs the way the Beast’s jaws had, not just once but over and over again. He was helpless against it. He lay in his bed and sobbed until he choked. His weak body spasmed. He made noises he’d never heard a human being make. He ground his face into his flat, prickly straw pillow until it was wet with tears and snot. She had died for him, for all of them, and she was never coming back.

He couldn’t think about what happened, he could only play it back again and again, as if there were a chance it could come out differently, or even just hurt a little less, but every time he played it back he wanted to die. His half-healed body ached all over, as if it were bruised right down to his skeleton, but he wanted it to hurt even more. He didn’t know how to operate in a world that would allow this to happen. It was a shit world, a fraud and a con, and he wanted nothing more to do with it. Whenever he slept, he woke up trying to warn somebody of something, but he never knew what, or who, and it was always too late.