…And I fell into her shadow.
Chapter 5
Reyla
I loved him before I had a name for what it meant
to tremble in someone’s presence and still feel safe.
Before I knew my heart could carry both joy and terror in the same breath.
Not because he was perfect, but because he was real.
Because he held me when he was breaking,
and never once pretended not to feel.
My love never came with guarantees.
It came with the willingness to bleed, to be wrong, and to stay anyway.
I’ll stand beside him or kneel behind him.
Whatever it takes, so long as he doesn’t walk through lifewithout me.
In every world, in every lifetime, I will find him.
Every part of me belongs to this man alone.
Neither time, silence, nor death have the power to
unwrite what the fates have already etched into my bones.
Chapter 6
Lore
Shadows rose, lunging, wrapping around me and pulling me down or sideways or…elsewhere. A wall of darkness reached from beneath Reyla, curling up my arms, dragging over my chest. It swallowed them first, then my breath. My hands clenched, but I did not fight.
I let it take me.
Reyla exhaled, and Evergorne disappeared. Colors smeared around me, streaks of red and gold and violent purple.
Soundless.
Then came a vibration, though not music. More like a feeling. Emotion turned into a sensation thrumming through my bones.
Cold swept across my face before vanishing.
I opened my eyes to find Reyla gone and me standing in a place that wasn’t ours but perhaps used to be. It looked like the Evergorne I knew, distorted by smeared glass. Trees bent at odd angles. Buildings around the castle leaning too low or sunk halfway into the ground. The sky overhead bled in strange hues, lavender with streaks of red, silver curling along the edges of theclouds. Wildfire loved the stars, but none existed in this place. They hid or had been stolen.
I turned in a circle, the ground crunching beneath me, then realized I stood on shards. Thousands of pieces of mirrored glass spread around me like rocks on a shore, thick and glittering. Every one of them had snagged her reflection. One flashed bright to my left, caught in the light of the strange, wounded sun. I stepped over to it, crouched, and touched it.
The world shifted around me as I dropped into one of her memories.
She was younger here, barely more than a child. She sat alone on a wide set of stone steps mounted on the front of a huge, grim stone building, her arms wrapped tight around her knees. Her boots looked too big for her small frame. Her sleeves hung past her hands. She stared at the ground, her face turned enough for me to see the uneven cut of her hair, hacked short and jagged, like someone had done it for her without caring how it looked.
The stone beneath her was wet and the gray clouds overhead threatened rain. A pale smear of blood trailed from the corner of her mouth to her chin.
