The air split open.
It wasn’t literal or physical. Yet I felt it: a tearing, a rending, as if the fabric of reality had been pulled apart to reveal what lay beneath.
The Realm opened in the space between us, cold and vast and endless, and I could see into it, the nothing that existed before life, after death, where being ended and non-being began.
The Raven Spirit looked back.
It had no form. No face. No body. Just presence, enormous, timeless and patient, watching from the depths of forever. Waiting. It had been waiting since the Shift. Since before the Shift. Since the first human learned to speak to birds and asked them about the darkness beyond the edge of the world.
Child of the grave, it said. Not words. Not sound. Just meaning, pressing into my mind.You who walked out of death. You who refused the ending. Do you seek to walk the dark as my children walk it?
“Yes.”
Then die.
Cador’s hands were still on my chest. His palms were still warm. But beneath them, my heart?—
Stopped.
It didn’t slow or stutter. Complete, immediate cessation. One moment it was beating, thump-thump against his palms, and the next it was stone. Silent. Still.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. The world tilted, and I was falling. Not down but in. Into myself. Into the shadow that had lived at my center since I’d crawled out of that grave, the hollow space where my soul had been rattling around loose for three months.
I was dying. Not fading, not slipping away, but the hard stop at the end of existence. The door closing. The light going out.
Terror clawed up my throat. I tried to gasp, tried to scream, tried to grab onto Cador’s hands and pull myself back, but I had no hands anymore. No body. Just consciousness, floating in an endless dark, watching the last threads that connected me to the world fray and snap.
This is death, the Raven Spirit said. Not words. Not sound. Just meaning, pressing into my mind.This is the truth you’ve been avoiding. This is what you are.
The last thread snapped.
I fell into nothing.
And then, a beat.
Deep. Heavy. Resonating through the void like a drum struck in a cavern.
THUMP-thump.
Another.
THUMP-thump.
Not my heart. His heart. Beating in the distance, calling me back, refusing to let me drift.
The blood tether pulled taut, and I felt it dragging me up from the depths. Hauling me back toward the light. Toward life. Toward him.
THUMP-thump.
THUMP-thump.
My heart restarted.
Not the quick flutter of the petals. Not the stuttering half-pulse of the blood tether. This was real. Solid. The heartbeat of something that would not stop again, that would keep going until the end of everything.
Synced to his. Perfectly. Eternally.
I gasped. My lungs filled. My vision cleared with a snap of returning consciousness, and I was back in my body, back on the polished stone with Cador kneeling before me.
