ONE
Aleksander
In the dark depths of my mind, a soft voice echoed.
It spoke only my name, over and over, as though desperate to not let me forget it. Whether it rose from my imagination, or memory—or someplace altogether different—I couldn’t say. Harder still to say how long it had been reverberating through the hollowed-out places where I’d once held thoughts.
I didn’t remember the sound beginning.
Couldn’t fathom it ending.
But, at some point, I recognized the one speaking.
Or, at least, I managed to conjure up a face to go with the voice: Bright blue eyes. Dark hair falling over ivory skin, curtaining scars only halfway healed.
Those scars…
My stomach lurched.
Nova.
I blinked, and she was gone.
Her voice went away, too.
Without it, the darkness seemed more absolute. Impenetrable. There was nothing else—had never been anything else. The longer I spent in the inky silence, the more I began to question if Nova had ever been there at all.
Focus.My own voice, now, pleading with me to stay awake, to stay aware. To not give in to the dark. Something wanted me to close my eyes and give in. To stop resisting. A pressure coiling around my mind, encouraging me to sink deeper and deeper into it.
I fought.
I was not in control of where I looked, but I could stillsee,even if my vision was hazy.
And what I saw was the aftermath of a battle that looked to have occurred some time ago—broken buildings, bodies crumpled and coated in dust, blood dried black in the grooves between shattered flagstone. I moved without any direction through it all. Memories tried to surface, floating around me like smoke, whisking away the second I attempted to grab them for a closer look.
My feet carried me to what remained of a bridge. After climbing over jutting support beams and leaping several precarious openings, I stood in the doorway of a circular room with a collapsed roof. A dais sat at its center, its face shattered and half-swallowed by rubble.
Standing beneath the broken doorframe, I felt something far more powerful than mere smoke and memory rise up and ripple through me. An odd, clearly magical energy lingered in the space, but there was something else beneath it—a stain of violence, raw and unfinished.
Something horrible happened here.
I tried to close my eyes. To think. The attempt was met with sharp resistance. I tried to move my hands toward my face, as if to shield myself from whatever horror stretched before me.
More resistance.
Abruptly, I realized what was happening:I was not controlling my body.
Lorien was.
And he wantedto see the destruction he’d caused.
He turned my head slowly, surveying the carnage with something like reverence. A feeling of satisfaction rippled through me, one that was not my own. But there was something else tainting it, I thought—something like uncertainty. Fear.
His, or mine?
I tried to pull back, to twist my body around, to take a single step out of his control—anything.
“You waste your energy, Aleksander.”
