Chapter 53: If I Fall...

Chapter 53: If I Fall...

🌙𝐋𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐡

The wind slammed into me, and I staggered, my hands flying out for balance I couldn’t find. The blindfold made everything worse—without sight, every sound was amplified, every sensation magnified. The scrape of stone under my feet. The whistle of air past the edge. The terrible, yawning emptiness I knew was there but couldn’t see.

"Lilith." Kaia’s voice cut through my panic, firm but gentle. "We can do this. But you have to let me in. Really let me in."

"I don’t know how," I whispered into the darkness.

"Yes, you do. You’ve done it before. When you fought Kustav. When Veronique choked you. You let me rise because you had no choice." A pause. "This is the same. You have no choice. So stop fighting me."

My legs trembled. The cold had seeped so deep into my bones I wasn’t sure I could move even if I wanted to.

"What if I fall?"

"Then we fall together. But we won’t. I promise you, Lilith. I won’t let us fall."

The chest tighted at the reassurance that sounded like a promise, something deeper that this moment alone. Warmth spread through my limbs, chasing the chill.

"I know you have had to rely on yourself all your life, alone even with so many around you,"

My breath caught not from the cold, the past shuttering behind my eyes.

"No one to catch you when you fell. I am here now. Take my hand, I am reaching out to you."

I stood there, blind and still, feeling the mark on my wrist pulse with heat that contrasted sharply with the frigid air.

And then I made a choice.

I stopped pushing her away.

The shift began immediately—like Kaia had been waiting at a door I’d finally unlocked. Heat flooded through my body, chasing away the cold. Bones began to crack and reform, I let out a howl that pierced my own ears. White hot pain seared through every nerve.

I held myself up despite my knees buckling under me.

The agony was sharp, clean—like lancing an infected wound.

"That’s it," Kaia murmured. "Let it happen. Don’t fight the change. We’re doing this together."

My spine curved. My hands—no, paws—hit the stone. Fur erupted across my skin. My senses exploded.

Even blindfolded, I could suddenly sense the parapet. The way the stone was worn smooth in some places, rough in others. The direction of the wind. The exact distance to each edge.

"See?" Kaia’s voice was triumphant. "This is what I can do. This is what we can do together."

I took a tentative step forward on four legs.

The world didn’t end. The ground did not fall under me. I was not clutching at air trying not fall to my death.

Another step.

The stone felt solid beneath my paws, each pad finding purchase instinctively.

"Good. Keep going. Feel the space around us. We don’t need eyes for this."

My wolf form moved with a grace my human body never possessed. Each step was measured, balanced. When the wind gusted, my body automatically adjusted, lowering my center of gravity.

I was walking the parapet. Blind. Shifted.

And I wasn’t falling.

"One," Vladimir’s voice came from somewhere distant. "Two. Three..."

He was counting my steps.

A little comfort in that bubbles up the surface as I don’t break stride.

The darkness is ominous, the random gust of wind unerving but I put on paw in front of the other, letting Kaia’s instinct guiding me. Like sight withou eyes.

With each step, my ears twitched, interpreting the sound of the pavement as it absorbed pressure and released sound, the sensation of each step different but instinctually easy to read.

The parapet tilted up to a slope that put my heart in high gear. For a second I feared I would slide back if I didn’t put enough force behind my steps as I charted the incline.

I gritted my teeth against my intrusive dread and fear.

"That’s it," Kaia’s words wove through my fears. "Step by step. Feel the ground beneath your paws. Let the stone speak to you."

I obeyed, shoving the fright away, even as my heart fluttered like a bird trapped in a cage.

My heightened ears briefly lost focus on the echo of the stone and zeroed back to Vladimir still counting from below. "Thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine..."

As my forelimb extended to the beginning of the fortieth step, the moment my paw touched the stone, my heart lurched.

The stone gave.

I lost my breath as the section crumbled, falling through the parapet.

I froze, my foreleg still extended, hovering where the stone had been.

My twitching ears caught the sharp impact far below—the sickening crack of stone hitting ground after a fall that felt endless.

That had been a long fall.

Too long.

I couldn’t do this. No, no, no—

"Lilith, STOP!" Kaia’s command cut through my panic. "Don’t move. Stay exactly where you are."

But I was already moving, my human instinct overriding wolf sense. I took a step back, away from the hole, my hind legs trembling.

"NO! Let me control this—"

I felt Kaia fighting me, trying to keep us still, to keep us on the path. But I couldn’t listen. I had to get away from that edge, from that hole, from the fall—

Another step backward.

Every muscle coiled to stop instantly as my hind paw hit stone at the parapet’s edge. It echoed back hollow, unstable—

That was all the warning I got before my paw slipped.

"NO!" Kaia roared in my mind.

And then I was falling.

Gravity seized me.

The blindfold made it worse—I couldn’t see which way was up, which way was falling. Just the sickening lurch of my stomach, the wind rushing past my ears, the terrible certainty that I was about to die.

>"SHIFT!" Kaia screamed. "Front paws to hands—NOW!"

But my body was already trying. Wolf instinct and human panic collided violently. My front limbs spasmed, caught between forms—not quite paws, not quite hands, useless half-formed things that couldn’t grip anything.

The stone edge rushed past.

And then—

My fingers caught. *Human* fingers, claws extended, digging into ancient stone with desperate strength.

The jolt nearly ripped my arms from their sockets. My body slammed against the parapet wall, and I heard something in my injured hip crack. White-hot agony exploded through my side.

I dangled there, blind, my wolf form dissolved into something grotesque and partial. Human hands. Wolf torso. Legs that didn’t know what they were supposed to be.

Two hundred feet of nothing yawned beneath me.

"Mistress!" A guard’s voice, panicked. Footsteps rushing—

"HOLD POSITION." Vladimir’s command cracked like a whip.

The footsteps stopped.

I hung there, my fingers screaming, my hip on fire, every muscle trembling with the effort of not letting go. The blindfold was still tied tight, plunging me into darkness.

>"Lilith." Kaia’s voice, urgent but steady. "Listen to me. We can pull us up. But you have to let me control the shift. *All* of it. No more fighting. No more human panic. Just... let go."

"I can’t," I gasped. My fingers were slipping. The stone was smooth, my grip failing. "I can’t—"

>"You have to trust me. Completely. Like you’ve never trusted anyone."

My mark burned so hot I thought my wrist would melt.

"Please," I whispered. To Kaia. To whoever was listening. To my mother’s ghost. "Please, I don’t want to die."

>"Then let me save us."

I felt it then—the choice. The surrender.

Not just letting Kaia rise. But letting *her* have control. Absolute, total control of our shared body.

It terrified me more than the fall.

But I did it anyway.

I stopped fighting.

The shift happened instantly. My arms bulked with wolf muscle and strength. Claws dug deeper into stone. My core twisted, realigning, finding purchase. My legs—finally, *finally* synchronized—braced against the wall.

And then we were moving. Not me. Not Kaia. *Us*.

One hand over the other. Claws finding holds I couldn’t see. Legs pushing, core pulling. The pain in my hip was still there, but distant, manageable, as wolf healing already began knitting damaged tissue.

Up. Inch by inch.

My hand—our hand—found the top edge. Pulled. My other hand joined it. And then with one final heave, we hauled ourselves over the lip and collapsed onto the parapet.

I lay there, panting, still shifted, still blindfolded. Every part of me shaking.

Alive.

Footsteps approached. Measured. Unhurried.

Vladimir crouched beside me. I felt his cold presence, heard the rustle of fabric as he moved.

His fingers found the blindfold and pulled it away.

I blinked up at him, my wolf eyes adjusting to the starlight. His face was unreadable, but something flickered in those glacier eyes. Something that might have been... approval? Relief?

Then it was gone.

"Again," he said.

My wolf form jerked in protest, a whine escaping my throat.

"You survived the fall. You learned the cost of de-synchronization." His voice was implacable. "Now you do it again. This time, you don’t fall."

He stood, holding out the blindfold.

"We have three weeks, Lilith. And you just used up fifteen minutes of night one."