"That's the barrier," Harlow says. "Between death and life. When we cross it, hold your breath."
We hit the barrier at the same time and breaking through feels like surfacing after being held underwater for too long. I gasp, choking on air that tastes like grass and sunlight, my knees hitting solid ground that I can actually feel beneath me. Harlow's arms catch me before I collapse face-first into the dirt.
We're on the grounds of Phoenix Sanctuary, inside the wards. The familiar buildings rise around us in the afternoon light, andthe relief of seeing them is so overwhelming that I start laughing, or maybe crying. The sounds are too tangled together to tell apart.
Harlow holds me steady while I remember how to exist in a body, in a world with color and sound and weight. When I can finally focus, I look down at my hands.
My essence has changed. The familiar warmth is still there, but it's threaded through with something cooler, pale traces woven through it like frost on glass. I look at Harlow and see the same thing in reverse, his aura carrying traces of warmth that weren't there before.
"The realm changes everyone who passes through it," he says. "We're marked now. Permanently."
I flex my fingers, watching the new threads move with my essence, already integrated, already part of me. The first real step toward what Mother Nature described.
Harlow steps closer. His cold hands come up slowly and take my face, tilting it toward him, and he kisses me, his mouth warming against mine, and I close my eyes and let him hold me there until the trembling in my legs stops.
"Thank you," I say. "For bringing me back."
"Always," he says. And means it.
13
Harlow
Skyeisstillshakingwhen Dante finds us on the sanctuary grounds. I'm holding him upright, my arms locked around his waist, his body trembling with the aftershock of crossing between realms. The death realm leaves marks on the living that take time to fade, and Skye's whole system is fighting to readjust to a world with color and sound and warmth. He'll be fine. He just needs a few hours to stabilize.
Dante comes running across the courtyard with his staff in one hand and divine light blazing in the other, and the relief on hisface when he recognizes us lasts about two seconds before it's replaced by something much worse.
"How did you get inside the wards?" he asks, and his voice carries the particular tension of a man who has spent days watching his defenses fail from the inside.
"Death realm," I say. "Shortcut."
"The others?"
"Three days behind us. Maybe four."
He absorbs this with a nod that doesn't quite hide the disappointment. He was hoping for six. He got two, one of whom can barely stand. I watch him recalculate, adjust, accept, and I respect him for not wasting time on complaints. "I need to show you something," he says.
I help Skye to a bench in the courtyard and he waves me off with the stubborn insistence of someone who hates being carried. "Go," he says. "I'll catch up when the ground stops moving."
Dante leads me through the sanctuary, and I see the corruption before he points it out. My death-sight reads it differently than living eyes would. Where Dante sees shadows clinging to walls and pooling in corners, I see something closer to the truth.
The corruption is a network of tendrils extending from somewhere deep below the sanctuary, threading through the stone, the wards, the earth itself. Each tendril pulses with a faint signature that I recognize from the death realm: consumed essence, digested and repurposed, the remnants of people who were eaten alive and turned into fuel.
The sanctuary is being consumed the same way Dmitri consumes individuals, slowly, from the roots up, dissolving what's there and replacing it with himself.
"It started days ago," Dante says as we walk through the eastern corridor. Students press against the walls as we pass,their eyes wide and frightened. Some of them have the glazed look I've seen on spirits who've been too long in the death realm, a detachment from their own bodies that makes my stomach turn. "Nightmares first, then the aggression, then the shadows became visible."
"It's not shadows," I say. "It's him. His essence, growing through the foundation. He's been feeding on the sanctuary the way he feeds on people."
Dante stops walking. "You can see the mechanism?"
"I can see all of it." I press my hand against the corridor wall and the tendrils recoil from my death-touch, pulling back a few inches before slowly creeping forward again. "The corruption is rooted somewhere below us. Deep. There's a massive concentration of consumed essence directly underneath the sanctuary, and every tendril connects back to it."
"The old tunnels," Dante says quietly. "I found the entrance last week. I didn't go down."
"Why not?"
"Because I could feel what was waiting, and I knew I couldn't face it alone." He meets my eyes, and the exhaustion in his face makes him look mortal in a way that demigods shouldn't. "My power has been holding the worst of it back, but I'm burning through reserves I can't replenish. Another week and I won't be able to maintain the barriers."
