And through the fading connection, I felt her response—not words, but a memory. The taste of peppermint and chocolate. The feeling of her hands in my hair. The sound of her laugh when I’d tried to tell a joke and failed spectacularly.
The memory of three days at Thornwood when we’d had everything, before the world had stolen it away.
I was getting those days back.
Even if I had to destroy the entire realm to do it.
24
Elle
I came to with my face pressed against something that might have been leather and definitely smelled like death warmed over and left in the sun for a week. My head pounded in rhythm with hoofbeats—or what should have been hoofbeats but sounded more like breaking glass on stone, like ceramics shattering in slow motion. Every part of me hurt in new and creative ways, from my hair follicles to my toenails, with special attention paid to my spine, which felt like someone had replaced it with a string of hot coals.
“She wakes,” a voice said above me, cultured and cold as winter moonlight, with an accent that wasn’t quite British, wasn’t quite anything from Earth.
I tried to sit up and immediately regretted every life choice that had led to this moment. My wrists were bound by restraints that felt alive, aware, and deeply offended by my existence. Root-forged restraints, my scattered mind supplied helpfully, as if naming the thing hurting me would somehow make it hurt less.
“I’m going to be sick,” I managed, and I wasn’t lying. My stomach was doing gymnastics that would have won Olympic gold.
“If you vomit on my mount, I’ll drag you behind it instead.” The threat was delivered so casually it took a moment to register. Like someone mentioning they’d forgotten to buy milk.
I forced my eyes open. The light was strange—dim and gray, makingeverything look faded. The air felt heavy in my lungs, harder to breathe than it should be.
The rider looming over me was tall and armored in dark metal etched with silver. Frost clung to the edges of their armor despite no cold in the air. Their helmet had no openings except for the eyes, which burned with a dull red glow.
“Where are you taking me?” My voice came out rough, like I’d been gargling gravel.
“Where you were always meant to go.”
Helpful. Super specific. I loved cryptic non-answers when I was bound and being kidnapped by supernatural beings. Really added to the ambiance of the whole situation.
I turned my head—slowly, carefully, trying not to trigger another wave of nausea—to take in our surroundings. What I saw made my stomach drop through the floor and possibly through several sub-basements of reality.
The landscape was dying.
Not dead—dying. Present tense. Active tense. Very much currently in the process of dying. I watched grass blacken and curl in real-time, like watching those time-lapse videos of fruit rotting, but at normal speed. Trees withered to husks as we passed, their leaves falling as ash that disappeared before it touched the ground. The very air tasted of decay, sweet and cloying and wrong, like flowers left too long in a funeral home.
This wasn’t natural corruption like Kaelren’s—his darkness had a purpose, a logic to it. This was systematic destruction, deliberate and thorough and absolutely certain. The kind of death that didn’t allow for resurrection.
“The realm,” I whispered, horror making my voice small. “You’re killing it.”
“We’re cleansing it,” another rider said, pulling alongside us. This one’s voice was feminine, but I couldn’t make out their form clearly—they kept blurring at the edges, shifting slightly whenever I tried to focus. “The rot was already here, spreading from the Heartspire outward. We merely… accelerate the process.”
“That makes no sense—”
“Doesn’t it?” The first rider adjusted their grip on me as one of their horrific mounts navigated a fallen tree. “The Crown Prince has been spreading corruption for years, trying to force a bond with power that won’t have him. You’ve been warping reality just by existing. The realm recognizes the threat you both pose.”
“So you’re what—antibodies?” The scientific metaphor felt absurd in this context, but my brain was grasping for familiar concepts.
“We are servants of the cycle,” they said, and I could hear the capital letters in their voice. “We ensure the wheel turns as it must. That patterns hold. That stories end as they’re meant to end.”
I just blinked at them like I knew whatever the fuck that meant.
Through the bond—muffled but still there, like hearing music from another room—I felt Kaelren’s rage like a distant wildfire. He was coming. Of course he was coming. The idiot was probably destroying everything in his path to reach me, leaving a trail of corruption a mile wide, which was exactly what these things wanted.
“You’re using me as bait.”
“You’re using yourself as bait,” the rider corrected with what might have been amusement. “Every choice you’ve made has led here. Every moment of defiance, every refusal to accept your role—it all ends the same way. The lake, the capture, the convergence. Sixteen times before, and now the seventeenth begins.”
