How had the daeyari done it? Pulled themselves out of the Void? Probably easier for them, made of energy and whatever Void pudding they’d built their bodies of. Fi’s human flesh weighed like stones thrown into a lake, dragging slowly down, down…
The compression on her skin grew heavier. Her breathless lungs ached. A creeping instinct told Fi: she couldn’t stay like this forever.
She opened her mouth to shout for help. No sound emerged. Of course, she’d need air to scream.
Who would even hear her?
With another flurry of arms and legs, Fi tried to move, to run, to push, to swim. Nothing. The longer she struggled, the tighter the swell in her throat. The cold seeping into her skin was something more than temperature, a haze at the edge of her thoughts.
Fi couldn’t die like this.
One brash mistake. She was supposed to be better than this now.
The Void had touched her as a child and sent her back, a spark of cold on her skin even when she walked the Plane. She begged the blackness to do so again, to let her move. To let her free. Back to frozen riverbanks and starry skies. Back to people who needed her.
Back to make Boden’s sacrifice mean something. If his energy lingered in the Void, Fi imagined him shouting at her, chastisement for being so reckless. For trying to run away again.
She shouted back.
No sound, just a scream in her head:Please! I don’t want to die like this!
Cold raked down Fi’s spine. She kept shouting out of stubbornness, just to keep from giving in to the surrounding black, even if there was no one who could hear.
I get it, this was a stupid idea! This place is stupid! I’m stupid! Just let me go back to being stupid in a place with air, and I’ll never cut a Curtain without looking again—
Static pricked the back of Fi’s tongue.
Baffled, she smacked her lips. It tasted like a daeyari teleport—but that was ridiculous. Desperation making her imagine things. No one could possibly be here with her…
… Right?
With a sluggish torque of her torso, she looked behind her.
Red eyes stared back.
Fi screamed with a gusto that would have been embarrassing, had it made any sound. Her gaping mouth was little more flattering. She lashed her arms, fighting to pull away. To no success. Faced with futile struggle, she had no choice but to fall still and confront the apparition in front of her.
It wasn’t Verne.
It wasn’t Antal.
There in the endless black of the Void, Fi faced a daeyari she’d never seen before. And she’d remember a face likethis. Sharp-cut, cool gray skin over high cheekbones, eyes carved with age uncanny for an immortal. His irises glowed like backlit carnelian. His antlers, tall and curved and wreathed in ten sharp points each side, enough to make Antal seem a young buck, a crown of black lacquer and carvings too dense for Fi to parse, dark hair a wide plait between the antler roots and tied back at the sides.
The daeyari was upside down.
No…shewas upside down, floating, while he stood on nothing, staring up at her with head tilted.
If this was a hallucination, it was one of her more creative ones.
Fi tried to ask who he was. Couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. For all the insults of this place, being unable to speak was the worst. Didn’t matter. He couldn’t be real. She gritted her teeth against the dulling beat of her heart, the creep of ice through bones and—
Calm.
The word filled her head. Fi didn’t know where it came from. And how was she supposed to becalm? She stoked energy from muscle, fighting the cold, but her heat sputtered.
Calm.
Fi twisted to look around, but she saw nothing, no one—except the apparition staring up at her. Maybe this was her subconscious trying to tell her something, conjuring this strange daeyari.
