HELENA POV
When I came back to myself, it did not happen all at once.
It was not a clean break from darkness into light.
It was more like surfacing through layers of water, slow and reluctant, pressure easing from my ears one inch at a time while the world above me remained blurred and unreachable.
The first thing I felt was gravity.
It pressed against me from every direction, not violently, but insistently, like it had been waiting for my return and was now reclaiming its hold over bone and muscle and blood. My limbs felt impossibly heavy, as though someone had poured sand into them while I was gone, and even the simple awareness of having fingers again felt foreign.
Then came breath.
Not the instinct to inhale, but the burn of it already sitting in my lungs, dry and faintly medici
