Brito woke up feeling like she was plunging back into reality from a deep, dark dream. Her body was sore and her mind was shrouded in a fog of disorientation. She tried to recall what had happened, but the memories were as fleeting as smoke. The last thing she remembered was fighting alongside Sharon, and then.... emptiness.
She opened her eyes, but the darkness surrounding her was almost impenetrable. Only a pale, greenish light poked through the thick fog hovering over the marsh. The air was heavy, suffused with the smell of decay and dampness. Brito tried to rise, but her body seemed to refuse to obey.
Suddenly she heard a whisper. Quiet, almost melodious, coming from deep within the mist. The words were unintelligible, but the tone of the voice seemed familiar. Brito's heart sped up. Could it be that Sharon was calling her? She struggled to get to her feet, ignoring the protests of her tired muscles, and moved in the direction from which the voice was coming.
Every step into the swamp seemed to be a struggle. The sinuous ground dragged her feet, and the mist seemed to thicken, entwining her like sticky cobwebs. The whispering grew clearer, but she still could not recognise the words. Suddenly, in front of her, a figure emerged from the mist. Brito's heart froze.
It was her mother. She stood there, wearing the same dress she had worn the day she died. Her face was pale, her eyes blank and her lips moved silently. Brito took a step back, feeling cold sweat run down her back. It couldn't be possible. Her mother had been dead for years.
The figure reached out to her, and there was a flash of recognition in her eyes. Brito felt a wave of emotion - longing, pain, hope. But something was wrong. Intuition, sharpened by years of struggle and survival, screamed that this was a trap.
- You're not real,' she whispered, clenching her fists. - You are only an illusion.
The figure trembled and a grimace of anger twisted its face. Suddenly, it disappeared and was replaced by another scene. Brito saw herself as a little girl, playing in a meadow in her home village. She heard laughter, felt the warmth of the sun on her skin. But she knew it wasn't true. This place no longer existed. It had been destroyed years ago during a raid.
- Stop it! - she shouted, clenching her eyelids. - I know it's not true!
The illusion disappeared and Brito found herself back in the swamp. The mist seemed to ripple, forming new shapes. This time she saw Sharon, lying lifeless on the ground, with a wound on her chest. Blood was oozing from the wound, forming a puddle around her body.
Brito felt her heart clench with pain. But something about this image was wrong. Sharon was too pale, too still. This was not her friend. It was another trick.
- I will not be fooled,' she hissed through clenched teeth. - Show yourself, whoever you are!
- You're stronger than I thought,' said the phantom in a voice resembling the rasp of metal. - 'But that's not enough.
Brito stepped back, feeling her heart beating like crazy. She had no weapons, no magic.
The phantom didn't lash out at Brito immediately. Instead, it looked at her... patiently. Like a predator who already knows that the prey will eventually weaken on its own.
- A warrior from Veltera - hissed the phantom with some mock tenderness. - A child of villages and stone. Proud... stubborn... stupid.
- "And you talk too much for a pile of fog," growled Brito, though her throat was burning with exertion.
But inside she knew - she wouldn't last long. Each step cost her more and more strength, and the reality around her began to fall apart again.
The terrain changed as if in a fever dream - once a swamp, once her old village, once some alien void where everything seemed to twist and stretch.
And then...
- Brito...! - A voice. A familiar one. Quiet. Boyish.
She turned abruptly.
There stood Elrik.
Dirty, emaciated, in a torn shirt. He looked at her with a mixture of fear and relief.
- Brito, I'm lost.... it's dark everywhere... I was afraid I wouldn't find you again....
Something squeezed her inside.
Instinct immediately screamed: it's not true. But the heart... the heart didn't listen to the instinct.
- Elrik...? - she whispered, not moving an inch. - Where is Sharon?
- I don't know... everything has fallen apart... but you... you're not going to leave me, are you? After all, you promised...
She clenched her teeth. After all, that's what she had once said. At the campfire. When Elrik couldn't sleep and asked if she was sure he wouldn't die.
The phantom knew her weaknesses.
Brito took a deep breath. She looked into the boy's eyes. And she saw what the phantom could not fake - a lack of life. The lack of that flash of childish feistiness that Elrik had always had.
It wasn't him.
- Nice trick,' she said harshly. - 'But Elrik curses worse than a drunken fisherman, and he'd already tried to throw something at me for leaving him alone.
The boy froze.
And then... his face began to blur slowly. His mouth twisted into something inhuman. The voice became hollow.
- 'You'll be left here alone, Brito. Everyone will leave you eventually. Sharon. Elrik. Everyone.
The phantom burst out of the mist like an angry shadow. This time she didn't wait. It struck with a force that Brito was unable to stop.
All she felt was cold.... A terrifying cold seeping into her body. She fell to the ground like a rag doll.
Her image began to blur.
- Come on, Brito... you don't die so easily.... - said her own voice in her head. An old voice. From her childhood. Her father's voice? Her grandfather's, perhaps? She didn't know.
But before she drifted off completely - the last thing she saw was how dozens of tiny lights began to appear around her. Like the souls of swamp fires.... Or something even older.
Something that was not the work of a phantom at all.
Something that was also looking at her.
She did not know how long she lay in this semi-consciousness. All she could feel was the dampness of the bog poking into her back and that icy, treacherous touch that slowly seeped under her skin.
But those lights... they were still there.
They floated around her. Small. Golden. Trembling.
Not like a phantom trap. They... didn't want to hurt her.
- What are you... - she croaked out, unsure if she was even speaking aloud or just thinking.
For a split second - or did she just tell herself that? - it seemed to her that one of the lights flashed more strongly, as if.... sympathetically.
As if they knew the pain. The loneliness. The fear.
As if they were saying: You are not the first, Brito of Veltera.
But the lights were not a rescue.
Nor were they deliverance.
They were just... witnesses.
The phantom materialised again just above her. This time she was not pretending. She was no longer playing with illusions. She looked like something taken out of ancient legends of swamp spirits - a face without features, hands like elongated bones overgrown with shadow.
- Tough,' she whispered with a sneer. - 'But the tough also break just the same if left alone long enough.'
The phantom raised her hand. Fingers of mist tightened on Brito's throat.
She felt everything drain out of her.
She was fighting - not with her body, not anymore. With stubbornness alone. With sheer rage.
- Fuck... You... - she choked out through a clenched throat.
The phantom just watched. And squeezed tighter.
The last thing Brito saw before the world disappeared was Elrik.
Not the one from the illusion. The real one. A memory? A hallucination?
He was smiling roguishly, with a knife behind his belt, dirty and stubborn like herself.