“Focus.” My voice sounds stronger now, but doubled—like I’m speaking underwater.
The cut on my palm throbs. I look down and watch blood pool in my cupped hand, then rise upward in defiance of gravity, forming globules that float around me like tiny red moons.
My magic surges in response—not the controlled power I’m used to, but something wild and hungry. It spills from my skin in threads of violet light, reaching out to touch the darkness.
The Fade shivers.
A path forms beneath my feet—not solid, but less empty than the void around it. I follow.
The air fills with sounds that aren’t sounds: crystal chimes, distant thunder, the rhythm of a heartbeat too slow to be human. Each step I take echoes impossibly, as if I’m walking through a cathedral made of ice.
Structures begin to form in the distance—not buildings, but suggestions of them. The Fade pulls from my mind, constructing familiar shapes: Ash Hollow’s lodge shimmers into existence, then dissolves into something older, a stone fortress I’ve never seen but somehow recognize. The cobblestones of Silverwood’s main street ripple beneath my feet, then reform as The Imaginarium—but wrong, stretched into a library of impossible dimensions, shelves spiraling upward into darkness.
The Fade isn’t showing me a place. It’s showing me what I’m connected to. What matters.
“Not real,” I remind myself, but my certainty wavers.
Because there—just ahead—stands a child. Me. Seven years old, watching with violet eyes that already know too much.
“You came back,” child-me says, voice like breaking glass.
I step closer. “This isn’t memory.”
“No.” The child smiles with my mouth but not my expression. “It’s possibility.”
The knife in my hand grows heavier. My blood continues to rise from my palm, drawn toward the child like iron to a magnet.
The child flickers, features shifting. For a heartbeat, I see Faelan’s smile on that small face.
“You’ve been playing my game so well,” the child says, but the voice deepens, resonating with power that makes my ears ring. “Did you think you chose this path yourself?”
My magic flares in response—defensive, angry. Threads of violet light lash out, slicing through the child’s form.
The apparition dissolves, but laughter echoes around me—familiar, mocking, everywhere at once.
The Fade pulses. Colors shift from cool blues to angry reds. The path beneath my feet cracks, revealing swirling darkness.
Dane’s absence hits me like physical pain. I didn’t just leave him behind—I left his strength, his certainty, his stubborn refusal to yield. I thought I was protecting him by coming alone.
Maybe I was just proving I could.
My blood continues to rise from my palm, forming patterns in the air. Not random—deliberate. The droplets arrange themselves into familiar shapes: interlocking loops, fractured edges, silver threads weaving through crimson.
The same pattern that marks my wrist.
I watch the knotwork form in my own blood, understanding crashing through me. This isn’t the Fade creating something new. It’s reading Faelan’s signature—the one he branded into me. The mark I’ve been hiding from everyone.
The Fade is taking more than I anticipated, drawing not just blood but energy, memory, will.
I can’t turn back. The way behind me has vanished—there’s only forward now, deeper into this place that isn’t a place.
The darkness ahead opens like an eye.
The Fade grows teeth around me—not literal, but the darkness edges sharpen, hungry to consume whatever pieces of myself I leave unguarded. I push forward, each step taking me deeper into a place that shouldn’t exist.
The landscape dissolves and rebuilds itself with each breath. One moment I’m walking through the fae-hunting lodge where Ispent my thirteenth summer—crude wooden bunks, metal tools for skinning magic from bone. The next second, I’m in Dane’s cabin, his scent so real I reach out, fingers closing on empty air.
“Nova.” His voice is behind me, warm and certain.
