A faerie queen shall rise to command the depths of the voids of darkness.
The prophecy that Parys had known about from the beginning. Clever, Parys. Parys, my sweet friend. If I mastered this, if I truly could move between realms, I could go to him. I could tell him about the pain in my heart, and he would eat with me and hug me tight and it wouldn’t be enough to stop the pain but it would be something.
I will tear apart this world, realm after realm, until I find you.
Oh, Arran.
My love, my husband, my mate.
How could I possibly do this without him at my side? To train me, to believe in me, to pull me back from the edge of darkness?
“You were supposed to be with me,” I whispered, across mountains and realms and eternity. “We were supposed to do this together.”
A single tear slid down my cheek.
Slid over the cracks in my shield of ice, sealing them once more.
I took a deep breath, wrapping the shreds of my soul around the mating bond inside of me. The weight of that tether was enough to hold me when I moved through the void. But this was a bigger jump. One I’d never made intentionally before.
Quietly, softly, I stoked the ember of power inside of me to life. That shining white ember of power, the same color as my hair, the same shade as the fur of Arran’s beast… I released the hold that I kept on it, as Arran had taught me to do. Then I released it further—a bit further than I ever had before.
I stepped into the void, let it tear me and rearrange me and massage my soul with that painfully sweet stretching sensation I’d become used to over the past few months. Just as quickly, as if I were going to appear at Cyara or Lyrena’s side, I reassembled. Except this time, when I stepped out of the void, I was not in the human realm.
The mountains were not just capped in snow, they were covered in it. The pine trees were there, but taller, sparser, as if the energy they took to soar hundreds of feet above my head made it impossible for them to grow any denser.
I turned slowly on the spot.
Without the dense pine trees to block my vision, I could see the hills spreading out before me. Deep emerald, craggy, sharp rocks that jutted upward, bare of the trees I’d left behind. In the distance, far enough away that I should not have been able to see it, the sparse winter sun reflected back at me off a lake.
But it was not the scenery that told me what I’d done. It was the magic that thrummed through me. The ember of power inside of me was dancing, singing. And those emerald hills, those snowy mountains, the majestic trees… they all sang back in answer.
I had made the jump to Annwyn.
19
ARRAN
Da-dum.
Da-dum.
Da-dum.
The pain never stopped. It changed, alternating from blinding white that seared through my veins to an intense throb in my skull that was surely building toward implosion. But all of that was secondary to the pain in my chest. It felt like my heart itself had been ripped from my body.
That couldn’t be. That was the sound of my heartbeat, wasn’t it?
Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.
Every twinge, every ache led back to that—the gaping hole in my chest.
Every dream...
How long had I been sleeping?
Dreams became nightmares. I saw the emerald hills of my homeland, scented the thick pine forests of the Spine—only to have it all dissolve away into nothing. The green faded to brown, the mighty trees withered and died.
Open your eyes.A voice—a command that felt like the space between breaths as it washed over my soul and filled in the cracks.
