Moving along one realm was one thing. The idea of trying to travel between realms… and without Arran. Arran had been the one to push me, to show me how to reach into my magic and start to control it. To take this new step on my own… I did not want to contemplate what that might mean.
“We are not leaving Arran.” A thousand years and a thousand more. That was the promise I had made. I would die on these blasted shores before I would leave him.
“How does the magic work?” Isolde asked quietly.
She did not express an opinion. Merely asked a soft, gentle question. It was telling—she considered herself my subject, but also an outsider. Less than Lyrena and Cyara, my Knights of the Round Table. I tucked that nuance away for later.
I sucked in a breath. “I wish I knew.”
Stares from my friends.
Exhaled.
“I can enter the void between realms,” I explained, as if that sentence actually did much clarifying. “Arran is my tether. Without him calling me back, without the bond to center me, I could become lost. I do not know if I can do it with him…”
Gone.
I could not say it.
My chest was going to cave in on itself. The shredded golden thread would not be enough to hold me together—
“You can feel the bond in your chest.”
My teeth gnashed, a snarl rolling up through me as my focus shifted outward once more, annoyance and relief at being pulled back to reality.
“Do you know everything?” I bit out.
“I know you,” Cyara countered. “If you could not feel Arran, you wouldn’t be sitting here calmly waiting—”
“You call this calm?” Lyrena interjected, her grin stretching across her face, her golden tooth catching the rays of the rising sun.
“—you would be slaughtering your way across Avalon.” Everyone stared at her—myself included. But Cyara was unwavering. “You can use your power.”
She was right, of course.
I’d been about to use it on the lakeshore, to spite Morgyn and her edicts.
I turned back to face Isolde, now scooping the concoction she called a meal into bowls. “Moving between places in the samerealm is simple. I can step into the void, then step back out. I’m hardly even there. Jumping between realms is something else.”
Isolde nodded, passing the bowls around the campfire.
She paused when she reached me, one claw-tipped white finger tapping against the side of the wooden bowl she held. “But you can do it. Create a rift.”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
I did not want to.
But in my bones, in the center of my soul where that shining ember of power slumbered, I could feel that answer with certainty. Even if nothing else in my life was certain anymore.
Isolde slid the bowl into my hands, retreating back towards the fire. Instead of sitting, she crouched down, balancing her own bowl in the cradle of her curved claws. Close enough to the fire, she ought to have burned. But her translucent white skin glowed softly instead.
She did not reach for a spoon or lift the bowl to her mouth to eat.
I swallowed back my own saliva, too tense for a bite, knowing more was coming. Already tense because I knew what came next.
“And you could take someone else with you, from one realm to another?” Isolde asked.
Another swallow. “In theory.” My eyes darted to Cyara, eating her bowl of mushy green stew and ignoring me; letting me sort through the feelings and fears on my own. The first time I’d brought someone through the void with me, when I hadn’t been ready, hadn’t meant to… I looked down at my arm, half expecting to see the bloody stump of her hand there. I sucked in a breath. “But it is not safe. You could end up maimed, or worse.”
