I felt it. Even without touching him, I felt the agony radiating off him in waves. It crashed against me like physical blows—worse than plague, worse than poison, worse than the dying child whose fever had nearly killed me. This was different. This was the death of something fundamental. The unmaking of a self that had existed for millennia.
I couldn't wait any longer.
My hands found his chest.
The moment I touched him, pain flooded into me like drinking fire and ice and lightning all at once. White-hot. Blinding. Absolute. Every nerve I had screamed in protest. Every instinctI possessed demanded I pull away, save myself, let him die if that's what it took to survive.
I didn't let go.
I heard myself screaming. Distantly. Like it was happening to someone else, in another room, in another life. My back arched. My vision went white. I was burning. I was freezing. I was being torn apart at the seams of my soul, unraveled thread by thread by—
I pulled.
The way I'd always pulled. The way I'd been doing since I was fifteen and first discovered I could take what hurt others into myself. I pulled and pulled, drawing his agony into my chest, grinding it down between the millstones of my will the way I'd ground down fevers and infections and the slow poison of tumors eating their hosts from within.
But this was bigger. Vaster. It wouldn't compress the way mortal pain compressed. It kept coming, kept flooding in, an ocean of suffering pouring into a vessel far too small to contain it.
And then—
Something else.
It started where my palms pressed against his skin. A warmth. A current. But not like anything I’d ever felt before. This was something new. Something unexpected.
Something that felt like recognition.
Light and shadow colliding. Merging. Becoming something neither had been before.
I felt him.
Not just his pain but him. His loneliness spanning millennia—ten thousand years of walking between worlds with no one to come home to. His quiet devotion to duty, to the burden he'd carried alone because no one else could. His desperate, burning hope that this sacrifice would mean something, that his lifewould matter, that he wouldn't simply disappear into the void he'd served for so long.
And he felt me.
I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat. He felt my isolation, my hunger, my bone-deep belief that I would never be enough. He felt the years of being needed but never wanted. The nights alone in cold guest houses after pulling strangers back from death's door. The drawer in my mind where I'd locked away every impossible hope because wanting hurt more than suffering ever had.
He saw all of it.
And he didn't look away.
The bond ignited.
Marks bloomed across my forearms—shadow-fractal patterns in deep purple and black, spreading like frost on a window, beautiful and strange and utterly unfamiliar on my own skin. They traced up toward my elbows, curled around my wrists, pulsed with a light that seemed to come from somewhere beyond the visible spectrum.
On Morgrith's skin, matching spirals of starlight appeared—silver-white against his pale flesh, mirroring my darkness with his light. Where our marks aligned, where shadow met star, something sparked and held.
The ritual completed in a burst of power that shook the mountain itself.
The Dragon Lords staggered back. The fire guttered. The ice shattered. The lightning earthed itself with a crack that left my ears ringing. And Morgrith's voice—wrecked, raw, barely more than a whisper—cut through the chaos:
"Evara's soul is released. It will find its vessel."
Then his starlight eyes rolled back, and he collapsed against the altar, utterly still.
I should have collapsed too.
I'd absorbed enough trauma to kill a normal person ten times over. My body should have been shutting down, organs failing one by one, the price of taking something so vast into my small human frame. I'd been prepared to die here. Had accepted it, even. A wound-walker's final act—swallowing pain too great for anyone else to bear.
Instead, I felt full.
