I pressed my palms against the cylinder’s cold surface, trembling as the creature's strange, glassy eyes stared back at me like a scientist watching a test subject.
This time, there were no other prisoners beside me. No faces to share my fear, no murmured words to break the silence. Only me, locked in a coffin-shaped tube, carried away into the dark.
I never madeit to Rottvalen.
Her voice, suddenly crying out inside my head, stopped me cold. It was faint, barely more than a tremor across the black, but it was hers.Zaph!My name, ripped raw from her throat, carried no words beyond it—just fear, desperation, and a pain that made my blood sing with violence.
I froze in the cockpit, hand hovering above the navigation controls. For a moment, I thought it was a trick of the Dark Abyss, some phantom whisper bleeding through the veils. But no. I knew her. I would know Ella’s voice even if it came to me through ten thousand dying stars.
I slammed a hand down and focused my mind on Ilythas.Report. Where is she?
The soldier’s voice came back steady, too steady.She is in the library, Praetor. Safe and sound.
Safe. The word landed wrong, dull, and sour. Her scream still echoed in me.
Show me, I commanded.
There was a flicker of resistance, then his eyes opened to me, and through them I saw the library. Silent. Halls of crystal shelves and shimmering projections, but empty of any living being. No Ella.
My aura flared.Empty, I growled.
Ilythas' mind jolted, defensive.No, Praetor. She is there. I see her, right there, where you left her.
I pressed harder, breaching his surface thoughts, driving past the shell of certainty he clung to. What I found underneath made my jaw clench until my teeth cracked. Buried deep, hidden like a shard of glass in flesh, was a memory. Nythor’s face. His hand. The Oracle’s command sinking talons into Ilythas' mind.
You saw nothing. She is here. Safe.
I shoved past it, forcing Ilythas to relive the moment. Ella dragged from the library, her body stiff under the weight of another’s will. Nythor’s eyes were gleaming with fevered hatred until the void swallowed them both.
I pulled out, leaving Ilythas gasping, broken by the invasion but finally aware of the truth.
Fury hollowed me, burned me from the inside out. Nythor. My own brother.
I had left Ella in his reach. Anger almost unbalanced me. Anger at myself, at Nythor, and at the rest of my brothers nearly overtook me. My aura flared black, and I was beginning to see black dots. It tookimmense willpower for me to calm down enough to order myself:Think, Zapharos. Think.
My hand braced against the console, while claws of rage tore through the calm I forced around myself. The urge to lash out, to break the ship apart with my bare hands, throbbed in every vein. But fury wouldn’t get her back. Not unless I gave it teeth.
Where would he take her? Why?
Ella’s cry still echoed in my bones, raw and desperate. I tasted her fear like ash on my tongue. My chest felt split open with it. Gods, I was furious. But underneath the rage, sharper and more dangerous, was fear.
What did Nythor want with her?
She was mine. The bond already burned between us, fragile, new, untested, but real. She would never bond to him. She couldn’t. Even if he tried to force it, she would break before she bent to him.
So why take her?
My aura cracked with shadow and flame, and then it hit me.
Nythor wasn’t trying tostealher. He wanted what I had—what he had never found—his own Aelyth.
Ella wasn’t his. She could never be his. But she was the key.
My blood iced. He needed her, not as a mate, but as a map.
Earth.
The word clawed through me. That was what he wanted. He would drag her through every corner of thevoid until she gave him what he craved—the way back to her world, the world seeded with our lost light.
