The Mist and the Lightning. Part 19 - стр. 12

Nik shudders a little, as if he is listening carefully to something, but total silence reigns around. Shaking his head slightly, he removes his hands from his chest and suddenly begins to scrape the dirt floor. The floor is hard, but Nik must have had enough time, because the hole he scratched in the floor is quite deep. He slowly and somehow mechanically stupidly scratches the ground with his nails. There is neither a mug of water nor a bowl of food nearby. Maybe the poor boy really its soil. Nik scratches, scrapes the ground, and, as if angry, in some desperation raises his hands tied at the wrists, clenches his fists and nervously taps them on the top of his head. How familiar is this movement to Kors! Son, why are you digging the soil? Are you trying to dig a tunnel? To dig your way to freedom? Kors is overwhelmed with emotions of love for Nik and resentment for the witch. How could she treat his son like that! Animals are better treated, and he was a child! Kors’s heart is filled with such pain that he can no longer look at this simple and at the same time unbearable picture.

“Gods, son! Son!” he screams in some kind of frenzy and sees that Nik is shuddering, raising his pale face, his empty eyes staring into nowhere. His lips move barely perceptibly, not a sound comes out of them, but in Kors’ head it clearly flashes: “Father?” It's like Nik is putting it right into his brain, without using his voice or language. Only emotions. Again and again, with such surprise, he seems to ask: “Father? Father?!"

Kors freezes in surprise, emotions overwhelm him, and he begins to “fall out” of the past. The picture gets blurred, but he still manages to hear a sharp cry: “Dad, don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!"

And Kors falls out of his strange state. He wakes up, realizing that he is lying on a camp bed in a tent, but in his head, full of despair, it still continues to sound:

“Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave…”

No, it couldn’t happen! It just couldn’t happen! Nik couldn’t feel him there at that moment and hear him, because Kors was just seeing through t the past. And the witch couldn’t treat his son so badly, she needed the child. She herself bought him for the Demon to share his body. So it’s not even the past, but a bad dream. It’s just a nightmare. Just a bad dream! Bad. Dream. Forget it!

What time is it now? His eyes were still tightly covered with plaster. But usually Kors always woke up early, only recently in the Fort his unchanging schedule has gone astray. It probably isn’t even nine in the morning yet, thought Kors. He heard the pounding of rain on the roof. So it hasn’t stopped raining yet, it’s been raining all night? Behind him lay Arel. Kors had no doubt that it was him. The prince was lying very close, clinging tightly and, as usual, placing his relaxed and therefore heavy arm on Kors. He pressed his face against the back of Kors’ head, and he felt his warm, measured breath on his hair. Kors didn’t remember how he fell asleep, didn’t remember when Arel lay down next to him. Most likely, Nik, using his power, put Kors to sleep, just knocked him out, and Kors was offended by this. “Why, like this, without asking, against will, put a person to sleep? Without asking even my desire? He treats me like a thing!” Discontent and irritation were rising in him more and more, and his mood was shitty since the very morning. He was unbearably infuriated by the plaster on his eyes, the sticky layer was pulling his skin, and in general, waking up in the morning, he just wanted to open his eyes, rub them, but Kors couldn’t do this. The way Nik had treated him yesterday was terribly upsetting now, too. Not only did he make him humbly kneel at the threshold, shivering from the cold, but he also blinded him. “I don’t want you to see my face! You won’t see my human face again!” What a crazy idea? Another stupidity in which there is no point, except for humiliation. Senseless humiliation. However, this is absolutely in their style – to humiliate for no reason and cruelly, always the same thing, nothing new. Lis has to be painted like a jester, I have to be blinded. And Nik does this not for the first time, Kors remembered how for several days he was forced to wear uncomfortable shameful glasses in which nothing was visible, and now even worse, Nik just plastered his eyes over. Silly games of an eccentric, cruel boy. “I don’t punish you, daddy.” Hypocritical rubbish, what else are you doing! You allowed me to be beaten! Kors preferred to believe that it was not Nik himself who hit him, but the prince. And then he simply ordered “sleep” and knocked him out.