Gilded Ashes-Chapter 296: Bitter Fruits

Something grabbed Raizen.

His body didn’t respond. His mind registered the pressure - hands on his shoulders, fingers shaking him - but it was like hearing a sound through deep water. Muffled. Distant.

He tried to open his eyes, but they wouldn’t move.

The shaking got harder. Violent, almost. His head lolled sideways against the mattress and something flared in his chest - not pain, exactly, but a sick, heavy feeling. Like his organs had been filled with wet sand.

"Move." Raizen thought.

He couldn’t. The hands kept shaking him. Rough. Desperate.

"Open your eyes."

He couldn’t do that either. After a few seconds of struggling, he managed to get a short, dark glimpse, between his eyelashes

He saw a dark shape - close, leaning over him, smaller than an adult. His thoughts came in broken fragments. Drugged. I took the antidote. Why does everything -

No.

Something was wrong.

The figure stopped shaking him. Raizen heard a soft, organic sound - like a stem uncurling - and even through the thick fog in his skull, he felt something shift near his legs. A faint warmth. The smell of plants.

Then a hand grabbed his jaw. Not gently.

Fingers pried his mouth open, and something small and round was shoved between his jaws. Before he could react - before his sluggish brain could even register what that thing was - the fruit burst against his teeth.

Bitter.

Bitter like nothing he’d ever tasted. It hit the back of his throat and literally burned him. His whole mouth clenched. His eyes started watering. Every nerve in his face tightened at once, and for a horrible second, his stomach lurched so hard he thought he was going to be sick right there on the mattress.

Then the fogginess in his thought lifted.

Not slowly. Not gradually. It felt like ripped away, like a curtain yanked off a window, and suddenly Raizen was wide awake. His vision snapped into focus. His heart hammered like he just ran a marathon. His muscles tightened as if he’d just been dropped from a height, and his lungs filled with air so fast it hurt.

He sat upright. The room was dark. Rain drummed against the building - louder than before, he noticed. The window above him was wide open, letting in gusts of cold, wet air. And kneeling beside his mattress, hand still raised from where she’d just force-fed him the worst fruit he ever tasted-

Enya.

No armor. The dark plates were gone, leaving her in the fitted combat gear underneath - smooth leather straps over solid fabric, all of it damp from rain. Her hair clung to her forehead. Her eyes were sharp, focused, and completely unbothered by the fact that she’d just broken into a room in the middle of the night to shove a suspicious fruit into someone’s mouth.

Raizen stared at her. His brain, now violently awake, tried to assemble the pieces. Enya. Here. Window open. Rain. He took the antidote - he took -

He opened his mouth to say something, but Enya had already turned away.

She moved a step, now close to Saffi’s mattress. Saffi lay on her back, completely still, mouth slightly open. Deep asleep. Raizen’s stomach dropped.

Enya grabbed Saffi’s shoulders and started shaking - the same way she’d shaken Raizen. Saffi’s head rocked side to side, but she didn’t even flinch. Behind Enya’s crouching form, a tiny stem curled up from the floorboards, budding into a small flower. Fruits formed at its tip – the same ones that Raizen could still taste on his tongue.

Enya plucked one and shoved it into Saffi’s mouth. It was forced, but not enough to choke her.

A few seconds passed.

Then Saffi’s whole body jerked. Her eyes flew open, wide, gasping, and she shot up on the mattress with the expression of someone who’d been pulled out of a frozen lake.

Before either of them could speak, Enya pressed a finger to her lips.

She moved quickly after that. Vines slipped through the open window behind her - thin, flexible, precise. They coiled around Raizen’s waist first, then Saffi’s, and Enya scooped up two umbrellas leaning against the wall near the door. She tucked them under one arm and pulled.

The vines guided them toward the window. Gently. Surprisingly gently, actually - Enya threaded them through the frame with a kind of careful patience that didn’t match the urgency of everything else she’d done. Raizen’s shoulders passed the windowsill. Then his hips. He felt the rain on his face, cold and immediate -

And then Enya yanked. Hard.

Both of them tumbled out into the night.

Raizen hit wet grass. The rain was immediate - cold, heavy, soaking through his clothes in seconds. He barely had time to properly hit the ground beneath him before the vines around his waist tightened and pulled. Not enough to hurt, though.

Enya was already ahead of them, silent with her vines, one arm clutching the umbrellas against her chest. Her vines dragged Raizen and Saffi forward in long, firm tugs - keeping them undetected, keeping them fast. Every few steps, a new vine would sprout from the ground ahead and latch onto the previous one, extending the line like a living chain that Enya controlled without looking back.

Raizen’s feet slipped twice on the wet vines. In his mind, he thanked himself for not changing from his usual, combat-ready clothes. The second time he slipped, a vine caught his wrist before he hit the ground, steadied him, and released. It happened so quickly he almost didn’t feel it.

Saffi moved beside him. Her hair was already plastered to her face. She hadn’t said a word since waking up, and the set of her jaw suggested that when she finally did, it would not be fun.

Enya stopped beneath a wide tree. Its canopy was thick - layered branches knitting together overhead like an improvised ceiling, dense enough that the rain only came through as occasional stray drops. The ground beneath was dry, or close to it. It was a pocket of stillness inside the downpour.

The vines around their waists loosened and retracted into the earth without a sound.

Enya handed them each an umbrella. Then she leaned against the trunk, crossed her arms, and looked at them both with the kind of expression that said she’d been waiting to enjoy this moment.

"So," she said. "Fun night?"

Raizen wiped rain from his face. His heart was still slamming against his chest from the forced wakeup, and the bitter taste hadn’t left his mouth.

"I took the antidote" he said. "I took -"

"You didn’t take any antidote" Enya said. She said it simply. Casually. The same tone she might use to prank someone, saying they had something stuck in their teeth.

Raizen blinked.

"You mixed up the vials" she continued. "Badly. Like, impressively badly. You didn’t just miss the antidote." She glanced at Saffi. "You gave her a dose too! Basically, you messed up two times!"

Silence.

Saffi, still catching her breath, still blinking - turned her head slowly toward Raizen.

"I - that wasn’t -" Raizen started, hands up. "I didn’t mean to - I thought the vial on the left was -"

Saffi looked away. Her jaw tightened. She gripped the umbrella like she was considering a very different use for it.

Raizen closed his mouth. That was the best option for now.

Enya, watching this exchange with open amusement, reached in her pocket and pulled out the small vine, the one she grew from the floor, still bending under one last fruit’s weight. She plucked it, and popped it into her mouth and chewed, apparently unbothered by the bitterness.

"The good news" she said between chews, "is that my wonderful berry completely cancelled the drugs. Both doses. You’re totally clean now." She swallowed, then grinned. "You know, you’re super lucky. I’ve worked with those kind of sedatives before."

"...And the bad news?" Raizen asked between breaths.

"The bad news is that the fruit has... Heh... Side effects."

She let the silence hang for a moment after that.

"For the next few days" she said, still grinning, "you two might want to stay close to a bathroom."

Raizen stared at her. Saffi stared at her.

Enya shrugged, still chewing.

"Also" Raizen said, "how did you even - you left. You said your dad was worried."

Something flickered across Enya’s face. Barely there. A slight shift in her expression - not quite a flinch, not quite a shadow, but something that lived in the space between the two. She looked at Raizen the way someone looks at a question they’ve already decided not to answer.

"Oh. Yeah. That." she said. "That was just a cover."

She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t explain what it was a cover for, or why she’d needed one, or what her father had to do with anything. Then Enya bit into another fruit and moved on as if she’d said nothing at all.

"I left early on purpose" she said. "Figured you messed something up." She gestured at both of them. "Well? I wasn’t wrong."

Rain filled the silence. The canopy above them shifted in the wind, letting through a few stray drops.

Then Saffi spoke. Her voice was quiet, but surprisingly steady.

"But what are you doing here?"