“What? No!” Bran staggered backward, his hands raised. “I thought it needed me. But we were too strong. It couldn’t take me!”
“So it tookhim?” Rynna’s voice splintered, and her body whipped toward him, fists raised, fury flooding her limbs.
But the ground shifted beneath them before she could take a step. It started as a low groan, then rolled into a violent tremor. Fractures split the stone with harsh, echoing snaps. Then, the air thickened as the Wraith erupted from the earth. Coming up in pieces, it hauled its grotesque form from the depths.
A towering monstrosity, its elongated body undulated with unnatural grace as a chain of slick, segmented armor oozed dark bile. While hundreds of needle-thin legs skittered across the cavern floor, it filled the space with the scrape of chitin and stone.
Rynna scrambled back, heart quailing as she fell to her knees.
The head emerged last, misshapen, with serrated fangs clicking together in anticipation, ringed in slime and venom. It hissed as it rose fully into the chamber, casting its massive silhouette across the walls in fevered, flickering light.
It was everything she remembered. Everything she’d hoped to never see again.
The nightmare given flesh.
But Rynna didn’t move.
She couldn’t feel the heat anymore. Couldn’t hear the others. The world had narrowed to the throb beneath her ribs where her heartbeat should’ve been.
Something inside her had shifted. Buckled. Like before…in the orb…when she’d lost her soul. It was a silent rupture spreading under the surface of her sanity.
She stared up at the thing that had taken Fenn—at the venom-slicked fangs, the glistening limbs—and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to fight it or walk into its maw and let it finish what its kind had started millennia ago.
Chapter sixty-two
Hervisionnarrowed,blackblooming at the corners. Air scraped uselessly in and out, too shallow, too fast. Her lungs refused to fill. She clawed at the ground, fingers digging into rock and ash, the shaking in her arms too wild to stop.
No. No, no, no. He couldn’t be gone.
Blood roared in her ears, drowning everything.
Then—
A face.
His face.
Kaelith. Crouched low next to her, weight braced on his good leg, body angled just so.
“Rynna.” His voice came from far away. Too far. Warped like sound underwater.
Her body jerked with a broken huff of air.
“Rynna!” His hands pressed to her cheeks, thumbs anchoring her in place, fingers pressing just beneath her ears.
His serpent’s eyes were dark and violent, glimmering with flecks of purple that caught the light like amethysts in shadow, dragging her to him, deeper, until she couldn’t look away.
“Stay with me, pet.” He grunted softly as the ground trembled beneath them.
“I...I c-couldn’t stop it,” she rasped. “It t-took him. It took—Fenn—it took him. I saw it—I saw—” Her hand flew to Kaelith, gripping the fabric of his shirt, fisting it between her fingers. “Gone. It—it—he’s gone—”
The cavern shuddered around them as the Wraith wormed higher, a grotesque emptiness yanking its way from the earth. Source sparked off its body in jagged streaks, and stone split like thunder. Chunks rained from the ceiling.
The world was falling apart.
“Rynna.” Kaelith leaned in closer, forehead nearly touching hers. “Listen to me.”
She couldn’t. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Her entire beingachedas her soul split wider with every second he was gone. The place where Fenn had lived inside her, solid and safe, had been gouged out, leaving nothing but a gaping wound.
