Chapter 6 It's time

By the time Lucius reached the hospital, Asia was barely conscious. Nurses rushed forward with a stretcher, and the wheels screeched against the tiles as they whisked her away. Lucius followed until the white doors swung shut in his face.

After she was taken away, Lucius became restless as he waited; guilt clung to him as he blamed himself for all that had happened. Minutes turned to hours, and every sound in the waiting room echoed too loudly in his ears. When the doctors finally emerged, clipboard in hand, Lucius shot to his feet.

“Are you a relative?” the doctor asked, glancing up from his chart.

“No, I’m her friend,” Lucius answered. “How is she?” he asked, worriedly.

“She is stable,” the doctor said, as his eyes scanned the chart again. “But we need to carry out more tests just to be sure.”

Lucius’s stomach knotted. “What do you mean?”

“Her bloodwork shows an abnormal pattern. Low red cells, low platelets, but a very high count of immature white cells. It suggests her bone marrow is producing abnormal cells. And we’re suspecting leukemia. Possibly stage two,” the doctor explained.

Lucius’s breath faltered. “What?” he trembled, disbelief trembling in his voice. “That’s impossible. She was fine. Perfectly healthy.”

“Sometimes, the body hides it well until it can’t anymore. The doctor replied calmly. “We’ll rerun the tests to confirm.”

Lucius barely heard him leave. The word echoed in his mind, sounding utterly unbelievable.

“How could she have leukemia?”

In Anastasia's hospital room, a light emanates from the void, and a woman emerges, standing solemnly beside her bedside.

She patted her hair, her eyes heavy with sorrow. “Poor girl… You should have listened. She murmured, her voice thick with pity. “There`s no way about it now. It's time,” she whispered the last word, almost to herself. Soon, she is going to lose her granddaughter. She began casting a spell to ease her pain.

As Lucius got to her ward, he opened the door and froze at the doorway as he saw Anastasia's grandmother beside her bedside. Asia lay unconscious, her skin pale as snow, yet her face looked strangely peaceful, while her grandmother, Morgana, stood beside her bed, murmuring words that didn’t sound like words he had ever heard before. The air around her glimmered faintly, and the syllables rolled like ancient rhythm, like something older than language itself.

“Grandma,” he muttered.

Morgana raised a finger to her lips. “Shush.”

Lucius swallowed hard, his skin prickling.

She said quietly, “We have to get her out of here.”

Before Lucius could ask what she meant, the door swung open slowly, and William stepped inside.

Lucius blinked in disbelief. He knew that face, though it was the first time he was seeing him in the flesh; how could he possibly not remember his friend's obsession? He looks exactly like the sketches Anastasia shows him before. Tall, handsome, his aura is screaming, dangerous, and divine all at once. Exactly how Anastasia described him.

Whenever Anastasia described him, he'd always laugh it off, thinking no man could possibly look like something out of a comic book. But, not to hurt his friend, he would nod to everything she said and listen like he believed her. And the same man Asia had admired for years, was standing right in front of him. Lucius could only say Anastasia actually didn't describe him well, because in person, he looked impossibly young, his features too perfect to be human, and his presence unsettling in its precision.

“Who are you?” Morgana demanded.

William ignores her. In the blink of an eye, he was beside Asia’s hospital bed, faster than any human could move. The air shifted with him, and bending as if the world itself obeyed his will. Lucius’s breath hitched. He was still recovering from the horrors he had faced, and now the man in front of him didn't even seem to be bound by human limits.

Without answering Morgan’s question, William's eyes swept the room, scanning the current of things unseen. “They are here," he said, his tone calm but threaded with an urgency warning. He lifted Asia effortlessly and was about to move, but then he paused.

He turned toward Morgana and said, “She must be kept safe. The enemies found her. In three days, I will send someone to bring you to me.” He was about to vanish again, but Morgana stepped forward.

“Wait!” she called after him.

He glanced back, irritation flickering across his face, “Careful, witch,” he muttered.

Lucius’s brows shot up at the word, a jolt of disbelief flashing across his face. “w-witch?” he muttered under his breath, eyes darting to Morgana.

Morgana heard him but ignored it, her attention fixed on the stranger before her. She flinched at the edge in his voice but forced her question, “Who are you?”

William turned slowly, and the air around him seemed to darken. His eyes met hers, calm but intense like a predator poised beneath still waters. His face gave nothing away, yet the aura surrounding him seemed to tighten.

“William,” he said, and in an instant, he was gone, his movement inhumanly controlled.

“No, wait,” Morgana shouted, but before she could finish, he was gone, disappearing so fast the air shivered in his wake. The hospital curtain swayed, the only proof he had been there at all.

Morgan clenched her jaw. “What an affront.” She muttered, anger rising in her chest. Arrogant, powerful, and impossibly fast. And yet… she couldn’t deny her instinct and the truth burning in her gut that Anastasia was safe with him, but she had never met him before.

“William.” She whispered again, tasting the weight of his name. Her eyes sharpened, catching light like flame. She lifted her head, inhaling sharply, and her every sense became alert. “They are here.”

Lucius glanced at her, puzzled. “Who?”

“Come here,” she ordered.

Lucius hesitated, then stepped closer. Morgana began to chant, her voice spiraling into a strange rhythm. The world around them flickered. Light bent, sound folded inward.

And in a flash, the sterile hospital world dissolved into the dim familiarity of Asia’s home.