I forced myself to stand, my knees giving way before they hardened beneath me.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, voice trembling but firm.
“He is what we once were. You are what we will become.”
Outside the corners of my mind, I heard Kael’s voice again, strained, terrified. I heard his storm, thunder rolling and echoing through some distant cavern. Flashes of light broke through the walls of darkness that encircled me.
His storm was battering the blight from the outside, trying to tear me free. But the blight only anchored itself deeper into my mind the longer I remained here.
The blight wasn’t trying to destroy me. It was trying to join with me.
I felt myself merge with hundreds of dead voices.
A low hum did surface beneath the agony, faint, fragile, nearly devoured by it. Not a scream. A whisper. A plea.
Not pain. A person.
I felt it then, in its heartbeat. A human rhythm, weak and trembling.
Someone was still inside. Hundreds of someones.
The blight wasn’t entirely made of evil.
It was a prison of sorrow.
Another black lightning struck me.
The pain screamed through me, a tide of agony without a name. But beneath it, beneath the roar of thunder and the howling shadows, I heard something else.
“Please…”
The whisper was so faint I almost missed it.
That was a soul.
And another.
And another.
They were not one monster. They were hundreds of lives trapped inside a wound that never healed.
I swallowed, breath shaking.
“If I speak to the pain,” I murmured, “I only feed it.”
The darkness tightened around me.
“But if I speak to you, to who you were, will you hear me?”
The storm outside cracked, and in its flash I saw the shadows recoil.
They wanted to be free.
Not feared.
Not avenged.
Free.
