And he learned me.
I didn’t try to reach Zirene again—not fully. That required more preparation, more strength, more… understanding of the shadow that lurked in my mate’s soul. But I practiced extending. Stretching. Holding our connections farther and for longer periods.
The third attempt left me gasping, head pounding with the effort of maintaining focus across distance. Ryzen’s hands steadied my shoulders, his presence both anchor and safety net. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt Xylo’s concern pulsing through our bond—teal worry threaded with professional assessment. He wanted to stop us. He didn’t.
Because he understood what I was becoming. What I needed to become.
On the fourth attempt, I reached farther than I ever had before.
Not just stretching—searching. Hunting.
The realization came as I followed the pull threading through me, sharp and aching and not entirely my own. Xenak. That was what Ryzen had been reaching for all along. Using my strength, my range, my stubborn refusal to stop, to search for his brother across the dark.
I let it happen.
I wanted to help. Wanted—desperately—to give him something solid. Evidence. A spark of connection. Anything that might ease the raw, bleeding absence he carried with him every waking moment. I chased the echo of Xenak’s presence until my head rang and my vision blurred, until my pulse thundered in my ears.
For a breathless handful of seconds, I thought we had him.
Then my strength gave out.
The connection snapped, leaving only the hollow aftertaste of failure and the ache of what I couldn’t reach. No proof. No voice. No peace to offer—only the certainty that I had tried, and that trying hadn’t been enough.
I sagged back into myself, shaking. But even as disappointment settled heavy in my chest, one truth remained.
I’d gone farther than before.
Progress.
Proof.
“You’re pushing too hard,” Xylo said quietly. His voice seemed to come from far away. “Your body is flagging.”
“One more.” I didn’t recognize my own voice—hoarse, determined, edged with something that might have been desperation. “Just one more.”
Ryzen’s grip tightened on my shoulders. Through our bond, I felt his concern warring with something else—admiration, maybe. Recognition of a stubbornness that matched his own.
“One more,” he agreed. “But this time, I’m going to guide you differently. Less anchor, more… fuel.”
Before I could ask what that meant, he opened his consciousness to me fully.
The rush of it nearly drowned me. His power—raw and vast and aching with loss—poured into my mental reserves like water filling empty wells. I gasped at the intimacy of it. This wasn’tjust showing me his thoughts or memories. This was sharing hisessence.Letting me draw on his strength as if it were my own.
I pushed outward again.
Not toward any of my safe anchors. I followed the pull that wasn’t mine—the raw, aching vector that had been tugging at me since the moment I’d touched Ryzen’s grief.
Xenak.
The moment I aligned with it, everything snapped into terrifying clarity.
I wasn’t searching anymore.
I wasseeing.
Green flooded my senses—thick, luminous fluid pressing in from all sides. Xenak was suspended inside it, his body bound upright in a cylindrical canister, tubes threaded into his spine, his chest, his temples. The liquid pulsed faintly with each sluggish beat of his heart. Runes—Verya in origin—burned along the glass, suppressive, invasive, feeding on him even as they kept him alive.
His eyes were open.
