"Stay with me," he growls. "Don't you dare fade on me now."
The exit is fifteen seconds away. Ten. Five.
The exit rushes up to meet us. Or we rush toward it. The distinction seems unimportant when reality is having a breakdown.
"Brace!" I don't know who shouts it. Maybe all of us.
The Veil makes one last attempt to keep us. The ground dissolves completely, leaving us running on nothing. On faith. On the sheer stubborn refusal to die in this gods-forsaken place.
We hit the fold in the Veil like a comet striking the atmosphere.
Everything goes white. Then black. Then every color simultaneously. My light magic screams as it makes contact with normal space, rejecting the transition even as it forces us through.
I feel my body come apart and reassemble in the space between heartbeats. Feel my consciousness scatter acrossdimensions and snap back together. Feel the binding convulse, trying to use this moment of chaos to strengthen its grip.
No.I push back with everything I have. The binding is a chain, and I am not its prisoner. Not today. Not ever.
We crash through into normal reality with all the grace of a meteor strike.
CHAPTER 21
BLOOD AND GORE
Nesilhan
I come backto consciousness slowly, reluctantly. Every part of my body screams in protest. The magical backlash feels like I've been turned inside out and set on fire.
"—still breathing. That's good. Breathing is generally considered favorable."
Kaan's voice. Strained but trying for humor. That's how I know things are bad.
I force my eyes open to find myself sprawled on moss-covered stone. We're in a cave—a real one, not something the Veil hallucinated into existence. Dim light filters through cracks in the ceiling high above, painting everything in shades of gray-green.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," Kaan says. He's kneeling beside me, his face streaked with blood and ash, exhaustion carved into every line. "You've been out for ten minutes. Which is, considering the alternative, an acceptable amount of time to be unconscious after performing magical feats that should have killed you."
I try to sit up and immediately regret it. Pain lances through my leg where the creature bit me, and I look down to find it bandaged with torn strips of what used to be someone's shirt.
"Don't move yet." Kaan's hands are gentle as he helps me lean against the cave wall. "The poison's still working its way through your system. You'll live, but you'll feel like death for a while."
"Banu?" The word comes out raspy.
"Here." Elçin's voice, from deeper in the cave. "Alive. Barely. We need to stop, Nes. She can't keep running."
I follow her voice and find my cousin sitting against the far wall, Banu cradled in her lap. The fairy looks terrible—her skin has gone from bronze to gray, her wings hang in tatters, and silver blood still seeps from wounds that should have killed her already.
But her chest rises and falls. Shallow breaths, but breaths nonetheless.
"How long do we have?" I ask. Because I can already feel them—the shadow creatures, the collapsing Veil, the pursuit. It's quieter here, muted by distance and dimension, but not gone. Never gone.
"Maybe an hour before they find us," Yasar says. He's standing near the cave entrance, his eyes scanning the forest beyond. "This cave sits at a nexus point—a place where multiple realms brush against each other. It will confuse their tracking for a while, but not forever."
An hour. To rest, recover, and figure out what the hell we do next.
Kaan moves to check Banu, and I watch him work with the practiced competence of someone who's treated too many battlefield wounds. His shadows probe her injuries gently, mapping the damage.
"The poison's the worst of it," he reports. "Some kind of essence-draining toxin designed to feed on magical beings. It's eating her from the inside out."
"Can you help her?" Elçin asks. There's desperation in her voice I rarely hear from my composed cousin.
