James opened his eyes onto pitch darkness and blinding pain. Sucking a ragged breath through clenched teeth, he opened his mouth to scream, but all he could manage was a strangled sob.

‘I can’t see!’ he spluttered. ‘I’m blind! My god, I’m blind!’

Tendons bulged from his neck as he attempted to raise himself from where he lay, but only crippling pain greeted his movements.

He slumped back, fighting for breath.

‘Nurse?’ he gasped. ‘Goddamn it, where the hell is everyone?’

Suddenly, as though in answer to his plight, the darkness seemed to take on new texture. Strange shapes appeared to dance and flicker across his vision as a feeble light the colour and texture of honey blossomed into existence.

‘Thank god,’ James sobbed, relieved that his eyes were not to blame for his temporary blindness. ‘Nurse, my arm, it feels…’ he croaked, before stopping to fight off a wave of nausea. ‘The operation… I think something’s gone wrong!’

His eyes stared up out of the immobile weight of his head, as he helplessly watched the approaching light bend and flicker across the mist still clinging to his vision.

‘Nurse?’ he barked, grimacing at the resulting flash of pain. ‘Say something goddamn it!’

The light’s progress was halted by his outburst and as he looked on through blurred eyes, he thought he saw a candle clasped between trembling hands.

‘Was there a power cut? What the hell’s happened to the lights?’

There was no reply to his questions, but the source of light slowly resumed its ponderous advance.

Finally he got his first glimpse of the young nurse, now revealed in the guttering light of the candle. Her face swam in the haze of his vision, a pale oval with almond-shaped eyes as dark and fathomless as black pits.

James blinked tears from his eyes, and regarded the face that seemed so reluctant to meet his own.

‘My god, what the hell’s gone wrong?’ James spluttered. ‘Am I dying?’

His hands tightened into rigid claws, and in a wild moment of panic he imagined that he had awoken in the silent depths of the hospital morgue.

‘Please,’ the girl finally said, her voice wavering, ‘you have been gravely injured, and only now are you breaking free of your fever. You must rest and keep as still as possible.’

Her words seemed to take strength from one another and with a firm set to her small mouth she took another step forward, casting the feeble glow of the candle across the narrow bed.

‘What the hell do you mean, injured?’ James whimpered, trying to cast his mind back to the moments before the operation. The last he remembered, he had been lying upon the operating table, preparing to be put under.

Had he fallen off the table?

As the nurse drew closer, he realised with a sudden chill that she wasn’t wearing her uniform but what appeared to be a bathrobe of white silk. Spurred on by her odd appearance, his eyes travelled past the nurse’s slender figure to the room beyond, seeking confirmation that the hospital walls were safely surrounding him.

His heart lurched at what he saw.

Instead of the familiar, sterile white walls festooned with blinking machines and gleaming white porcelain, he beheld the impossibility of walls fashioned from carved wood. The guttering light of the candle bathed the intricate carvings in squirming shadows, illuminating cascades of carved leaves and strange flowers weaving between the serpentine boughs of fantastical trees. The walls seemed to move and coruscate within the flickering light, as though a restless forest moved within the dark grain of the wood.

A cool, slender hand touched James’ fevered brow and brought his eyes back from the hypnotic dance of the walls. The scared animal that had peered through the nurse’s eyes just moments before was replaced now by genuine concern. When she spoke, her words came more freely as though emboldened by his helplessness.

‘The arrow was not poisoned, yet your body acts as though it were,’ she said, her brows knitting together above the inky depths of her eyes. ‘For two days you have been close to death, but slowly you return to us.’

The girl’s soft words crashed into James’ skull like cruel weights, adding to the sum of pain throbbing within.

‘Arrow?’ he whispered hoarsely.

The fragmented details of a half-remembered dream slowly bubbled to the surface of his mind. He had been flying through the cool night air, his hospital gown billowing and fluttering about his body. He remembered descending into a great, dark forest, lit by flashes of lightning and driving sheets of rain. He remembered the solid weight of the black arrow shaft, pinning his body to the tree, the blurred outline of his attacker moving in for the kill…

‘Impossible,’ his voice grated.

Instinctively, he reached a trembling hand toward his head, seeking out the wound left by surgical saw and scalpel. But as his fingers tentatively, then frantically explored the stubble clinging to his scalp, there was no such wound to be found; only the now familiar ache of the corruption still lurking beneath the casement of his skull.

Pain, more intense and frightening than anything he had ever experienced before, suddenly boiled inside his head. He screamed uncontrollably into the room, sending the nurse’s hand recoiling from his fevered brow like a small bird taking flight in the midst of a storm.

The candle spluttered and died, and against the solid embrace of the bed, he tumbled back into the black void from which he had come.