No, no, no.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. This wasn’t how any of it was supposed to end.
“A final test,” the Acolyte answered. “And you will be welcomed here, my child. You will befree.”
Kinlear could do nothing but watch in horror as he slid the blade across his own hand. His palm split wide open...
And his blood was not red, as it had always been.
Instead, it was a deep, soulless black.
27
He screamed.
But he couldn’t wake up.
He screamed, but there was nothing, nothing at all, that could keep him from watching the same dream play out, time and time again.
Something was wrong in the waking world.
Was he dying?
Was this to be his end?
“Please,” he begged, as it all replayed again. The fall, the kiss, the flight, the knife. “Please, set me free from this.”
It wasn’t until he saw a burning, golden light...
A flickering flame in the night, lighting up the sky, as ifallof it had caught fire. Those flames shoved past every vision as he fell, burned them to ashes until there was nothing left but darkness.
Until he was no longer falling, but...
But lying on something cold and hard, a familiar pain burning against his hand.
Magic.
He inhaled as it washed through him, warmth in the cold, a light in the darkness.
As he finally, blessedly, woke up.
He woke in a cave, covered by his brother’s heavy white cloak.
And...Six.Her enormous dark wing waswrapped around him, her hot breath in his face. His body ached, but at least he was warm, and?—
His head.
Oh,gods,his head ached so bad it felt like it had been separated from his shoulders. Like he’d crashed not against the snow but against a tree and somehow, against all odds...
He’d lived.
He looked down to find a healing rune on his hand. It wasn’t as finely inscribed as he would have done. Magus would have scoffed at it. But at least it served its purpose, and the glow from the corner of his eye revealed that perhaps there was one on his head, too.
He was on a rocky, cold floor. A cave, his breath forming before him in clouds, even though there was a fire off to the side. He could hear it crackling, along with...
The sound of heavy breathing.
Ezer.
