Disclaimer: If I owned Raised By Wolves, I would have added a fourth book to finish the loose ends and that unbearable cliffhanger.
A/N: This is my take on what might (and should) have happened after the end of the third book.
The first time I woke up was to a world of pain and darkness, but it was the crying I couldn't stand. The crying wasn't mine. It couldn't be mine because I felt more than knew for a fact that my own throat had already been shredded raw into pieces from straining not to scream.
Nothing made sense in this hazy trance of shadow and light with my body torn between hell and an empty void. All I knew was that if this was what hell felt like I needed to be there. For the moment I let myself fall into the calm, slumbering shadows I would never wake up a second time.
And I needed to, had to, but didn't want to. The pain I could handle. It was the crying I couldn't stand.
My body begged me for peace. I fought it to stay alive.
The second time I woke up I wished I hadn't. Everything was toobrighttooloudtoofast. Snippets of noise danced on my eardrums to the unsteady beat of my heart and the fever pitch brightness of my headache. At least the crying wasn't there anymore.
There was an itch going on beneath my skin, something trying desperately to claw its way out. There was too much awareness around me, too many sensations clamouring for first place in my blood rusted mind. It had taken all my willpower not to fall asleep for eternity by focusing on one single word: Fight.
It was all I could do to keep breathing out of my shattered lungs. Each breath burned with pain, and pain was life, pain was purpose.
Pain was pack. It was what they felt and I could feel it too. A faint niggling in the back of my head urging me to hang onto that wavering thread and slowly, torturously crawl my way up.
I knew it was night through instinct alone and it was the same way I felt her presence.
Her presence gave me comfort like a lone silver moon in the thorny woods of my soul. Her footfalls steadied my heart, anchoring it to whatever life I had left. In the frigid depths of oblivion, we were one entity and that gave me warmth.
It did not take the pain away or lessen it but it made things bearable. Time was counted in the number of inhuman crunches my bones made, in the amount of ways my name was being whispered, sobbed, screamed and uttered like a prayer, and most of all in the growing anticipation and dread as I slowly surfaced from this nightmare to a new one.
The third time, I woke up.