“To seal the deal,” Blythe adds, withdrawing a small dagger. She seizes my left hand, turning it palm-up.
The blade feels like a line of ice across my palm. The pain is sharp, shocking, and dark blood wells up instantly. Before I can react, she urges me forward, forcing my bleeding hand flat against the lid of Merlin’s sarcophagus. The stone is impossibly cold, a dead thing that drinks the heat from my blood, from my body. A faint, crimson light begins to trace the edges of the carvings beneath my hand, feeding on the offering.
“What… What deal?” I breathe.
Blythe looks down at me, and for the first time in months, I see a smile touch her lips.
“The one that will change everything.”
A low groan echoes from the sarcophagus itself, a sound of grinding stone. The crimson light flares, blindingly bright. A crack, thin as a hair, appears in the granite directly beneath my palm. It spiders outward, fracturing the ancient seal with a sound like the world breaking.
The vibrations stop. The distant screams die. The very air in the chamber becomes thick, still, and silent. Time itself feels like it’s holding its breath within this space.
Then the tombstone cracks wide open.
And a darkness that is not an absence of light, but a presence—a solid, breathing, hungry thing—bursts from within.
44
BRYNN
Three bodies cool on the stone floor. Two were dragons. One was a man who thought he could play a god. And the monster who killed them, the monster who was Chad, is gone.
Nyssa makes a choked, retching sound, finally breaking from her shocked stillness. She stumbles away from the bodies of her kin, her borrowed cloak doing little to hide the violent trembling of her frame. Her amethyst eyes, wide with horror, meet mine.
“I…” she starts, but no other words follow.
I start moving, a lurching, painful shuffle down the corridor, using the wall for support. I don’t have a plan. I have one direction.
Esme.
She’s been in that gods-damned chamber far too long. The war gets louder with every step. I pass a window and see an unholy aurora of dragonfire and spell-light smearing the sky.
I push on, forcing one foot in front of the other. My only goal is the heavy stone door at the end of this hallway. My sister. Theanchor in this hurricane of insanity. I have to get to her. I have to make sure she’s still okay.
I’m fifteen feet away when a strange pressure builds in the air, making the hairs on my arms stand up. The door to Merlin’s chamber glows sharper, pulsing white and a cold, icy blue at the cracks around the edges. A low hum seems to vibrate through the floor, a deep, resonant note that makes my breathing go shallow.
I freeze, my hand hovering over my ribs. Something is happening.
Something is… finishing?
The stone door explodes outward in a pure, concussive force that throws me off my feet. I slam into Nyssa, both of us stumbling against the wall.
Darkness pours out, moving like a tide of black oil, silent and inexorable. It floods across the floor, climbing the walls, extinguishing the torchlight as it advances.
Then it’s flooding over me. It climbs my legs. My stomach locks. I try to inhale and the air isn’t there—like it was stolen by the dark. Panic slams into my ribs. I force another breath.
Nothing.
The black rises over my mouth, my nose, my eyes?—
and the corridor disappears behind it.
45
DAYN
My claws screech against the enchanted gold plates of Anees’s armor. He’s slower, less agile, but the plates absorb the kinetic force of my attack, deflecting my fury. He is a coward hiding in a gilded shell.
