This is a päyur bond fusing.
As soon as that realization enters my mind, my entire body flares. Black tendrils sift off my skin like smoke, swarmed with golden rays that shine amidst the inky black, flocking around my body in rippling streams.
I stare at my hands, my arms, watching the black and gold drift off me like steam from a hot spring.
It’s our auras. Mine and hers, mixing.
The päyur magic ripples. I feel it within me, like someone shoveling up my entire foundation and packing it in with Auren’s essence.
Our souls are now bound together. Our lives forever connected. Our magic entwined.
It means that she and I are a match fated by the goddesses. It means that we have been given the greatest gift ever bestowed on a fae.
It means that she’s mine.
Elation fills me as much as the magic does. Stunned, all I can do is stay kneeling on the murky ground.
I feel her magic pulse through me, the warmth of it filling my limbs. My rot dumps into the land, but streaks of gold, like gleaming ribbons, run through the black roots.
This power that stretches over the land also stretches through me. I feel it swim through my depths and rush into my chest.
I feel her burn. Herlight.
I jerk my eyes down to my torn shirt, gaze locked on my distended heart. My teeth grit with the growing heat of the burn as sweat pours down my face. The heat is nearly unbearable, and yet, it feels like it’s burning away all the bad, like cauterizing a wound.
The skin over the bulge starts to itch, making me flinch with its intensity. I have to scratch it. The urge is compulsory. Lifting a shaky hand, I reach down, and the moment my fingertip skims against it, the itch sizzles. Then the browned, sickly skin starts to curl and flake away like burning parchment.
The itch isn’t satisfied. Not at all.
My finger presses down further, hooking in, taking chunks of more dead layers. I dig it all out, dig it away, like molded bits of bread being ripped off and tossed onto the floor. Faster, frantically, needing this sensation to be sated, I keep going. I watch as each piece peels off, a lighter brown than the layer before, all while my chest continues to burn.
I peel away one last flake with a hiss, and it finally stops itching. The spot is no longer bloating, and I blink down at it, breathing hard.
Without any more of the dead skin, I don’t see a rotting, blistering heart. Instead, something else has grown beneath all those flaked-away layers.
Right here, over my heart, is a scale.
Agoldenscale.
I pull in a sharp breath, just before I reach down to feel it. Yet the moment my fingertip touches it, I explode.
Not my heart, butme.
Spikes and scales burst out of me in a violent rush that tosses me back. The spikes along my forearms, the ones down my spine, the ones above my eyebrows. I cry out as they pierce through my skin so fast that blood streaks from the punctures.
The countless rotted veins spread throughout my body start slithering wildly, like serpents racing away, just as my fae fangs drop down. My cheekbones feel scraped raw when my scales appear, and my ears pinch, the tips sharpening.
I remember what it felt like when I first tore in two. When I was forced to fight my father with raw power, and when the world ripped open. I remember what it felt like when that same power somehow rippedmein two.
But this…this feels like those two parts of me are smashing back together.
It’s euphoric. Agonizing. Like needles sticking soul-deep, thrashing a thread through my entire being, and binding me back together again.
Two halves combining into a whole.
But when I feel the last stitch merging me…somethingelsesuddenly surges up.
Argo cries and flings back when shadows suddenly lunge out of my body. And it’s not my aura. This is something else.
