Soft. Distant. Devoted.
“I’ll find you again,” he says. “However long it takes. I’ll find you.”
The words chase me down as I fall back into the dream.
Back to the silk. The hands. The heat.
Back to belonging.
I don’t notice the Ether dimming around me, or how his body goes still beside the cushions.
I just sink into the warmth, sighing like I’ve come home.
Maybe I’m sleeping.
Maybe I’m awake.
I can’t tell anymore.
All I know is I want to go back.
Chapter 26
Seth
The pull jerks me forward one final time, and the Void shifts around me.
Not gone. Still here. But different.
The darkness thickens into walls—black stone, silver fire flickering without heat. The oppressive emptiness becomes a chamber, and the air tastes like smoke and something sweeter underneath.
Ethos’s chamber.
Terror floods through me because I know this place. Know what happens here. Know I should turn around and run before he—
Then I see her.
Every thought scatters like ash.
She’s lying on floor cushions in a pool of silver light, naked and trembling, and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Not beautiful like art or distant stars. Beautiful like water after years of drought. Like the first breath after drowning.
Beautiful like hope I’d forgotten existed.
Her dark hair spills across velvet, and even from here I can see the way her chest rises and falls, fast and shallow. Her skin glows faintly in the dim light, and silver threads drift around her like she’s exhaling magic with every breath.
But there’s black threading through the silver.
A lot of black.
My stomach drops.
I know what that means. I’ve seen it before, in the others who crossed through and didn’t make it. The ones who heard Ethos’s voice and followed it into corruption.
But never like this.
Never this cruel.
