Aria Snow pov :
The first thing I felt was gravity.
In Selene’s realm, I had been weightless—a being made of light and mist, floating in an endless summer. But here, in the waking world, gravity was a heavy, suffocating blanket. It pressed down on my chest, pinning my limbs to the bed as if lead weights had been sewn into my skin.
My body felt like a foreign object. My fingers were stiff, refusing to bend. My throat felt like I had swallowed a handful of sand, dry and scratching with every shallow breath I took.
Pain.
It wasn't the sharp, agonizing pain of the beating I had taken three months ago. It was a dull, throbbing ache of muscles that hadn't moved in ninety days. It was the atrophy of a body that had forgotten how to live.
Open your eyes, a voice whispered in the back o
