I didn’t feel the impact. The snow went straight through us, continuing its quick descent down the side of the mountain. But the cold, a chill down to my very bones, a freeze so thorough, I wondered if I would ever be warm again, remained.
Hold, I cautioned through our mental link. Shifting for a second was already draining enough, and verbal speech might break my focus. Not that Dante could have heard me over the roar of the avalanche anyway.Hold.
Sweat broke out on my brow as my strength ebbed away.
Hold.
I gritted my teeth and looked at where my partner should have been, had he not shifted too. My only consolation was the pressure of his hand in mine. But the snow just kept coming, an endless, deadly white sea intent on drowning us.
HOLD.
But we couldn’t. Not anymore. Dante was reforming, rematerializing right beside me, and my own strength was failing, my body reaching its limits.
I phased back. And the weight of a mountain struck me, a crushing blow which sent my whole, broken body hurtling head over heels backward. My enhanced strength had saved me from the worst of it, had kept my lungs from bursting, my ribs from shattering, my skull from collapsing. But the breath was knocked out of me, and I struggled to regain it under the weight of the suffocating snow.
Melt it,Dante’s voice came weakly from within my mind.Melt it and breathe.
The fourth Trial.
I embraced the snow around me and pushed chunks of it into my mouth until it became water. I breathed in what little oxygen I could from the small pool I’d created. But it was a constant process, new snow replacing the old the moment it was moved away, and my jaw was tiring, my eyes closing from exhaustion and lack of consistent oxygen.
I was going to die.
I realized that just before the snow rolled over top of me and pressed me down, flat on my back, against the side of the mountain. I was going to die beside Dante, both of us covered in an immovable mass of snow, laughed at by our so-called gods.
I stopped swallowing the snow. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t ever going to be enough. My legs wouldn’t move. My arms were pinned at my sides. It was over. It was all over. I closed my eyes and retreated into my own mind. There was nowhere else to go.
They say your life passes before your eyes in the moments before your death. They say you see images of who you were, of what you did, the best and the worst of yourself. Memories flashing through your mind’s eye so quickly, you hardly have time to savor any one of them. But that wasn’t my experience. I didn’t think of my past. I thought of my people, the ones I loved the most, the ones who cared for me, and the ones who didn’t.
I thought of my mother, the pain she would feel when they told her I’d passed, if she even knew at all. I thought of my brothers and the grief they would suffer in silence. I thought of Dahlia, how my loss would be just another for her to endure. I thought of my friends in the Third Ring, Sophie and Graham, Harrison, Felix, and Noah. I thought of Cosmo and how quickly he would move on from this, how callous he would be toward Myrine in her mourning for Dante. I thought of Bria and how she would weep for us, of Milo and how he might lock himself in his library and try to forget us, of all of the Deckers and Third Ringers that had put their hope in us, had believed in us, and how that hope would be crushed once more by yet another cruelty of this world, of these Trials.
Finally, I thought of Darius. I thought of how he’d been taken from me by the same invisible force that had been trying to kill me for over a year. I remembered the way he’d smiled when he proposed we join these Trials, the eagerness in his voice when he’d told me he truly believed we could make it. The look on his face when he’d disappeared into that void.
I thought of Olympia and her attempt on my life. How she seemed to hate me almost as much as she loved Dante. She would mourn for him, more than anyone, and no one would care. Not for me, the nameless girl from the Third Ring, or even for him, the promising son of the strongest bloodline in Sanctuary.
They would be disappointed, but they would move on, continuing to worship the same bullshit gods that had drawn us into these Trials just to bury us under thirty feet of immovable snow. The gods who’d designed ten whole obstacle courses for the express purpose of putting young men and women in grave danger, and for what? We still didn’t even know why.
Dante gave his life for his grandfather’s vision and neither one of them even knew what they were hoping to attain.
Rage rose up within me like I’d never known.
There was a darkness in me. Maybe it was new or maybe it had always been there, a part of me, hidden deep within. It was an empty void, the sort which can only come from a woman prepared to die. A woman with nothing left to lose and nothing more to give. It was a darkness, emanating from my heart and swallowing everything in its path, rising up until it ate every ounce of my fear and sorrow and replaced it with hot, blinding fury.
The gods are playing you,I remembered the words I’d spoken to Cosmo just days ago, and I held onto them, letting them fuel my hatred.
They have forsaken you…
Absent gods…
The Geist are dead.
A tear trickled down my temple, and I could have sworn it sizzled against my skin, burning through the snow against my cheek.
The gods are playing you.
I screamed. I’m not sure how I did it, how I opened my mouth without snow filling it, how I took a breath deep enough to manage the sound, how I exhaled. But I did. I screamed so loud that, for a moment, I thought perhaps the trembling of the mountain wasn’t due to the avalanche at all, that it was my fury alone which shook the very ground beneath me.
A burst of darkness bit through the pure white. Snow flew in every direction. The pressure upon my chest eased, and I gulped in air greedily. My eyelids were heavy, closing from a combination of exhaustion and a lack of oxygen for so long. But when I turned to the side, letting my face fall against the cold stone, I saw Dante. He was curled up and unconscious, but he was clear, free of snow and so pale he seemed to be sleeping.
