Fire. Midas had never seen a fire, but he had heard them described before, and he was certain that he must be on fire. He would have screamed if he could draw breath, but his throat was almost swollen shut.
In fact, there was a reed forced between his teeth and down his throat to prevent that very thing from happening, but he was unaware of it for the time being. Breathing was a laborious process, and if he devoted too much attention to it, he couldn't seem to manage it at all. Instead he tried without much to make his ears listen. He thought he might have heard voices.
Voices would be good. Voices would mean home, with da and ma. Ma was a priestess. She would make sure the gods let him live. This was just a test of his faith. If he did not doubt his ma or the gods, no matter how much he hurt, he would live.
Definitely there were voices, Midas decided in one of the parts of his mind. It felt like his mind had splintered into tens and dozens of parts, and all of them were burning, but some were burning more distantly than others. Maybe he could pull away to a part that was burning less somehow.
Probably a priestess could do something like that, anyway. Midas wasn't a priestess, but he was a brother ka-nikt of the Order of the Golden Paw, and that had to count for something. He decided that the he should look for someplace cool in his mind. Cool and dark. It was impossible to find any such place, however. The fire burned everywhere, scorching him wherever he turned.
In the world outside his head, his rate of aspiration increased as he began to pant around the reed.
His jaw hurt, and not in the same way everything else about him hurt. It wasn't a fiery type of hurt. It wasn't just a fiery type of hurt, anyway. There was also the type of hurting that happens when he yawned too hard, or if he tried to carry something heavy in his mouth for too long. In fact, it was the reed forcing his mouth open which made him uncomfortable, but he was unaware of the reed except in the vaguest of ways.
The side he lay on hurt, too. Presumably from the pressure of his weight applied to all his bee stings. He wasn't really thinking about the bee stings, he was just in pain. It had almost been better when he had just been dealing with the fires in his head instead of feeling the ones in his body, and the other pains that had nothing to do with the fire.
His eyelids flickered open momentarily but then shut again. He hadn't seen anything. It had just been a muscle spasm as the fever took him again.
Midas was swimming in an ocean of fire. It curled around him, splashed him, and sometimes bowled him over in waves. He could feel its currents tugging at him beneath the surface, trying to drag him down to a deeper flame that promised...something. Not relief, but something different, if he stopped swimming and succumbed. It would be so easy.
He was not ready to do that yet. He was a Stormborn, and that meant that he knew about swimming in dangerous waters. He was a ka-nikt of the Order of the Golden Paw, and that meant that he would never give in without a fight. He was not ready to give in to the deep flames yet. He just had to keep his head above the surface, gasping breaths of scorched air before the next wave hit him.
He wanted his mother and his father. They would make the hurting stop, he knew it. Even just thinking of them helped a little, but it was hard to keep them in his mind while he was in the fiery ocean. It was hard to keep anything in his mind.
His ma would know all about how to keep her mind where it ought to be. Priestesses knew things like that. He had thought that before, hadn't he? He couldn't remember, but it seemed like he had. That meant that time had passed. He had no idea how much time had passed though. Or maybe no time had passed at all, and everything was happening at the same time, and it only seemed like time had passed, and what he thought was a memory was just the same thing happening at the same time in his head.
There were altogether too many things going on in his head, Midas felt. If the fires weren't bad enough, and they were pretty bad, there were the shapes that lurked between the tongues of flame. The ones that twitched in sinuous and obscene ways, or crawled like the carpet of bees he'd climbed over before the fire.
And then Midas was screaming. It was only in his head, but even there it was not enough to drown out the way the fires' crackle and roar had been overcome by the humming and buzzing of bees swarming him once more, forming out of the fire and covering him like a blanket that tickled and then stung. It hurt. It hurt!
There were no oceans of fire or splintery bits in his mind for a moment. For a moment, the recollection of his experience with the bees brought Midas perfect clarity that almost pushed him into dreadful consciousness, which would have been the worst possible thing. At least locked within his mind and his pain, he wasn't thrashing or moving. If he were awake, he would not be still. He would panic at the reed down his throat. He would hurt himself.
Perhaps there was a part of him that knew that and kept him from completely rising to the surface of consciousness, protecting him from himself. But perhaps not. As it was, the cub was trapped in the hell of his mind, unable to escape and subjected to all the fiery torments reserved for the dead. If he survived, and if he woke, it was almost a certainty he would not be the same cub that he was before.
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