Then there was nothing but water and memory and the sensation of drowning.
The water was every temperature at once—burning, freezing, body-warm, nonexistent. I couldn’t tell if I was breathing it or if it was breathing me. Images flashed behind my eyes like a film reel running too fast:
Jo young and beautiful, choosing love over duty. Jo old and dying, pressing a locket into my hand. My mother as a child, golden marks spreading up her small arms before Jo took her away. My mother dying when I was young, the marks having turned to cancer on Earth. Kaelren as a child, hope bright in his eyes. Kaelren screaming, corruption spreading from that first wound. Myself in a crown of living wood, power radiating from me like heat from astar. Myself dead, nothing but a failure.
When I finally surfaced I was somewhere else entirely.
The Hunt was waiting on the other side.
They stood in a perfect semicircle, tall and terrible and patient. Their armor caught light, reflecting it back in sharp flashes that made my eyes water.
“Prophet,” one of them said, and their voice majestic and horrifying all at once. “You’re exactly on time.”
I tried to speak, to make some sarcastic comment that would make this feel less like a nightmare, but lake water poured from my mouth instead—silver water that evaporated before it hit the ground, leaving only the ghost of moisture.
“The convergence approaches,” another Hunt rider said. “The wheel turns.”
“I just want to go home,” I managed, though the words came out waterlogged and wrong.
“Home,” the first rider mused, tilting their helmed head. “Such a simple word for such a complex concept. Is home the Earth you left? The Thornwood where you danced? Or perhaps…” They gestured, and I felt the weight of their attention like pressure in my skull. “Perhaps home is wherever he is.”
Through the bond, thin as spider silk now but still there, I felt Kaelren’s rage like a distant wildfire. He was coming. Of course he was coming. He would tear apart the world to reach me.
“I’m sorry,”I thought through the bond, not knowing if he could hear me.“I’m sorry we don’t get more time.”
“Take her,” the lead rider commanded. “Auradelle awaits.”
Hands lifted me onto a mount that smelled of old leather. Restraints that might have been rope or might have been living vines wrapped around my wrists, burning with a cold that went deeper than skin.
As we rode—flew? —I caught glimpses of what we passed. The realm was dying, sick, corrupted. Not just in patches but systematically, spreading out from the Heartspire like infection from a wound. Trees stood as blackenedskeletons. Rivers ran backwards, their water thick and dark as old blood. The very air seemed to rot, leaving tears in reality that showed nothing but void.
And somewhere behind us, following the pull of our bond, Kaelren was coming—bringing his own corruption, his obsession, his determination.
The Hunt rode on, and I closed my eyes, trying not to see how each hoofbeat left another piece of the realm a little more broken.
Trying not to think about how we’d had three days together, and I’d wasted at least half of them in strategy meetings.
Trying not to count the hours we’d lost that we could never get back.
23
Kaelren
The bond didn’t break—it stretched and tore and muted until I could barely feel her. One moment Elle was there, angry and bright in my consciousness, a flame I’d grown dependent on without realizing. The next, almost nothing. A whisper where there had been a shout. A cold ember where there had been fire.
The loss hit me like a physical blow, doubling me over at the lake’s edge where I’d just watched her disappear beneath impossible water.
“ELLE!”
The roar tore from my throat, inhuman, primal. The golden vines that had appeared on my arms in the Pleasure Grove—the ones I hadn’t told her about, hadn’t let her see when she’d traced patterns on my skin with glowing mushroom paint—turned black instantly, spreading up my forearms like poison through veins. I’d kept my sleeves down these past three days, unwilling to show her that being with her had marked me permanently. Where they touched my carved marks, the silver-blue light died, replaced by something that ate light rather than created it.
I dove back into the Mirror Lake without thinking, but the water rejected me—burned like acid against my corrupted marks. Each stroke felt like swimming through molten glass. But she wasn’t there. The lake had taken her somewhere else, somewhere beyond my reach.
I surfaced gasping, scanning the water that had become hatefully serene.
“Get away from the water!” Vashael commanded, but I was already moving, running in the direction my corrupted instincts said she’d been taken.
Trees split where I passed, their trunks cracking not from physical force but from the wrongness radiating from my skin. Roots erupted from the earth, reaching for enemies that weren’t there, responding to the violence in my blood.
