The pain eases. My already struggling heartbeat falters. No breath fills my lungs, no oxygen filters through my blood.
A numbness encases me, spreading across my skin, then sinking deeper and deeper until it’s penetrating my bones. A soul-deep numbing — reminiscent of the pockets of nothingness I passed through, that I was momentarily suffocated within, when I reached for the trinkets on my windowsill. Or when I tried to walk directly up the path toward Rath outside the beach house.
Understanding flares through me — too late — as my mind connects all the missing pieces.
Those collectibles were connected to the soul bonds that were somehow stripped from me, connected to the missing sections of my past. And when I inadvertently trace those missing threads, I find only the nothingness.
The lack of essence.
That’s what surrounds me now.
Wherever this portal is supposed to lead, I’ve been trapped in the middle and cut off from the essence that fuels the universe. The universe as I know it, at least.
I’m trapped here, either dying or to forever be suspended within nothing. No one is coming to rescue me. The universe won’t suddenly reach for me, won’t move me out of harm’s way.
What happens if I die here? What if the universe can’t shift the power I hold to another vessel? Does the rest of the world crumble into nothing without its Conduit? Without all the essence that flows through me?
No.
I refuse to be thrown away, tossed aside so carelessly both by the Cataclysm and the universe. Even as death seeps through me, I understand that much.
The power that opened this portal — both the person and the energy they harness — is the antithesis of the power I hold. The Cataclysm doesn’t want me dead. But he’s also drastically miscalculated by trying to transport me within or through a power so diametrically opposed to my own.
And I’m not fucking dying by accident.
I’m not inadvertently taking the rest of the fucking world with me just because I chose Presh, chose to go with Reck rather than be plucked away and sheltered by the universe.
There has to be … something … I can reach … some part of me, some thread of essence …
Yes.
There.
I reach for the power I can feel frozen just above my chest, just over my heart. It’s dying too, flickering in and out …
It’s mine.
To protect me, shield me, focus me. And also for me to wield.
I grab for it. With my mind because I cannot move my hand.
I claim it. Mine.
Power — pure unfiltered essence — flares, searing through layers of my clothing as the power conductor that hangs around my neck ignites. A shard of the intersection point, according to Rath’s research.
Disguised as a multimillion-dollar pink diamond caged in threads of gold, that shard alone is enough to sustain me, even —
Pain radiates through me as I take that energy for my own, infusing it through my deadened system.
I can’t stay suspended in nothing like this, though. As powerful as the shard is, as I should be, I can’t survive like this. I have to move somehow. I have to get back to —
Sheer agony rips through me. My body convulses as I’m physically ripped through one reality — or that’s what it feels like, at least — and ejected out into another. My own.
I slam onto hard-packed dirt. Glass shatters around me, slicing through my clothing, scoring my deadened skin. The power of the amulet is wrenched from my grasp, abruptly fading before I can reach for it again.
No … that’s not glass.
Ice.
