I want to demand how this happened. How could we have possibly failed her? I need answers—I needher, but the sight of my dead keeper is so petrifyingly surreal that my surroundings seem to fall away. Vaguely, I’m aware of the temperature plummeting sharply around us. Ice crackles across the ground, shock-freezing brambles, corpses, and a ghoul on the attack as it blooms outward from the spot where Everett kneels. Thick snow begins to billow around us.
Bright royal blue flames ignite in the gray distance of this living nightmare as Baelfire’s dragon unleashes hellfire on friend and foe alike, so far gone to the rage and loss that he’s no longer himself.
And still, I cannot move.
You lost her just as we said you would, a voice snickers.
My father’s voice sneers,Good riddance to that worthless bitch.
“Stop,” I whisper helplessly.
The voices mock me. They cackle with one another as my world fragments. Slinking madness curdles my stomach as distant screams continue to echo in this newfound hell.
I would give my soul to bring hers back.
I would doanything.
Crypt materializes beside us, covered head to toe in blood. He drops a lich’s decapitated skull before falling to his knees beside Everett and Maven, visibly trembling. For a moment, his expression reflects everything I feel—the horror and stark, hopeless anguish as the absence of the bond takes its toll. Our hair and clothes begin to waft as if we’ve collectively been plunged underwater, and a burning smell like ozone singes the air.
I see the instant the DeLune snaps for good. His face goes eerily vacant before he vanishes.
A moment later, inhuman shrieks and screams of a different nature go up like a chorus of horror itself. Madness has joined us on this hellish battlefield, and gravity continues to malfunction around us as Limbo tears into the mortal realm.
Let the end of the world begin, voices crow inside my head.Without the scourge, you are all but broken, cursed legacies.
For once, the voices are right.
I don’t care.
The only thing I can manage to still care about as insanity encroaches is Maven’s lifeless body, frosting over in Everett’s arms. The surreality of her being gone still hasn’t registered fully, but I know one thing. If nothing is done, she will decompose. Return to dust, as all living things do.
But no. I won’t allow it. The dust can’t have what’s left of my keeper. She said she was mine, and she will be mine no matter where her soul wanders without me.
Necromantic power pulses through my veins, heightened by the thick atmosphere of death surrounding us. The voices in myhead shriek and shout over one another as I fight through the insanity to prepare a potent preservation spell?—
But the moment I take one more step closer to the only trace of my keeper left upon this earth, her body vanishes like a shadow in daylight.
Just…gone.
My ears are ringing, but I can still hear Everett’s shout of rage directed at the heavens as this mad world begins to freeze and burn at once.
Because she’s gone.
Yes! Gone! The bitch is gone!the voices in my head cheer, ripping my mind to bits.
My keeper has been utterly wiped from this earth thanks to her revenant purpose, taking my will to fight for sanity with her. As everything around me dissolves further into chaos, I let the madness have whatever is left of me that didn’t just die with my blood blossom.
PART I
THE BROKEN
1
MAVEN
My chest burnsuntil the familiar ambience of stale death wakes me.
I bolt upright, more disoriented than I've ever been as I blink at the cathedral-like temple surrounding me. I’m sitting haphazardly on top of a cold, ornate onyx altar that's cracked as if an impact struck it. In front of me are several rows of pews filled with withered, dismembered skeletal husks.
