I scanned the room, frantic, as if I might find proof lingering in the shadows.
The certainty settled heavily and cold in my bones.
And I knew in my heart it hadn’t been a dream.
Chapter 3
Wolfe
“Where the Heart Binds”
The world held its breath and waited for me to break.
But how much more could I shatter?
I already existed in fragments.
I wasn’t whole here.
Not in this endless expanse of muted gray and nothingness.
My thoughts fractured before they finished forming, and my body came apart and reassembled in slow, merciless cycles, as if fate couldn’t decide what to do with me.
Splinters of myself hovered, barely held together. I formed. I unraveled. Over and over and over.
My body hung suspended in the grayness, half-kneeling, half-tilted forward, as if I were caught in the moment between collapse and rebirth, forced to relive it without the mercy of completion.
I existed in the pause before pain resolved. Before death finished its work.
Was I dead?
Was I alive?
I didn’t know.
Questions swirled in my mind for what felt like centuries, and I had no idea where
I was. Or what I was.
Was I still Fae? Or had the deathwalker powers taken me?
If I was still alive, what kept me living?
Was it the curse?
Orher?
My mage. Elariya.
My Ziyka.
What became of her?
The space around me breathed, thick and heavy, like smoke that refused to disperse. It pressed against my skin and slid through me, carrying the faint impressions of things that no longer lived. Faces flickered at the edges of my vision.
Dead things.
Souls, maybe.
