The ley line buckled.
I didn’t reach for it. It reached for me.
My void, vast and starving, peeled open. And the Surge poured in.
I let it feast. It drank deep—greedy and infinite. I became a vessel and a wildfire all at once. My bones hummed. My breath burned. And yet, I wanted more.
Magic exploded through me like lightning in a drowning storm. It flung me to the far end of the room, yet there was no pain. I heard the thud of my body meeting the wall. The light of the ley lines exploded with one final, blinding swell, and then it died out.
Daphne
What I chose to become
The Surge had torn me open. Now, the world slammed back in. My bones screamed in agony as I scrambled to my feet, leaning on the wall to catch my breath. The Salt Womb was a battlefield. Twisted bodies littered the floor. Smells hit me–so heavy they were nearly palpable—blood and dust, wet stones, incense that lingered around for millennia, and something foul.
Hollowborn.
Orren’s druidic chants shook the tunnels. Camille’s blood spells hissed. Maerya and her Watchers of the Dead carved through the Hollowborn ranks.
And above it all, the desert wind wailed like a choir of lost souls. The mural’s colors were so bright that my eyes nearly bled.
God, what did the Surge do to me? I was so painfully aware of everything, so alive.
I had no time to marvel.
Emrys. I needed to find Emrys.
When I limped along the walls, sand swirled around my ankles, each little grain going up, defying all laws of nature.
The Surge’s magic was gone. But something curled itself into the void in my chest and grinned when I looked.
The ley line magic was in me now.
It didn’t matter. Emrys.
I felt it—a fragile thread of silver humming inside me. Unwinding. I recognized that essence—it was him. A last strand of his power still tethered to my heart. One end wrapped around my soul. The other...
The other led into the Dusk Roads.
“I’ll find you, Emrys Ravenborn,” I said through clenched teeth.
I followed the thread like a child chasing breadcrumbs through a dark forest.
It vanished into the stone wall. I stepped around the corpses of the Twisted Ones, their bodies still twitching with the last drops of their stolen magic. The limestone beneath my palm was cold and solid. Relentless.
“Take me to him,” I whispered. “You have no other choice.”
The wall stood solid. The gaps between the ancient stones grinning like toothless faces.
“Take me to him, or I’ll make you do it,” I murmured as if the magical highway were a living being which I could bargain with.
Nothing happened. I wiped my sweaty palms on my tunic and reached for that new power that curled inside me. I opened that Pandora’s box inside me—just a sliver.
It was enough. The void wasn’t just a hunger. It was a key. A weapon. A map. And now it answered to me.
The wall parted.
Suddenly, I stood in a vast dark realm—a monstrous loom stretching into the horizon. Threads shimmered and twisted through the black. Some glowed. Some pulsed. And there—that silver strand, humming with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
