“I could. I want to,” I say honestly. “It would be easier. The bond would likely forge regardless. But I will not start what we must be by stealing your will. I have seen what that kind of power does. I will not be Idris.”
Her breath hitches.
Silence stretches between us, heavy as bedrock.
Finally, slowly, she exhales.
“I’m not saying yes for you,” she says quietly. “Just so we’re clear. I don’t know you. At all. You’re terrifying, and weirdly literal, and apparently part earthquake.”
“Accurate,” I murmur.
“I’m saying yes for them,” she continues, jerking her chin toward the half-built town, the distant lights of the highway, the invisible houses and schools and hospitals that will feel every tremor.
“For the people who don’t even know this is happening. For the kids who’ll sleep over unstable ground. For the families who can’t just pick up and move when the foundations start to crack.”
Her eyes flash.
“If going with you means I actually have a shot at stopping that… then yeah. I’ll go.”
Power roars in my chest, a surge of molten certainty.
I school my expression with effort.
“Understood,” I say softly. “You’ll go with me for them.”
“And maybe a little for me,” she admits, almost inaudible. “I’m tired of patching symptoms and never getting to the source. And maybe, I’m tired of being alone, too.”
Stone shifts inside me.
Slowly, deliberately, I extend my hand.
“Then come to the source, Alina Fawcett,” I say. “Let me show you Nightfall.”
She stares at my hand.
At the quiet fault.
At the empty lot, the flickering trailer, the life she is about to step away from.
Her fingers slide into mine.
The world exhales.
Power arcs between us—hot, grounding, right.
The seams between realms thin, responding to our joined will. I open a path through the stone, a vein that runs deeper than bedrock, down into the caverns where Nightfall’s roots entwine.
The air shifts.
The Jersey chill gives way to the warm, mineral-rich breath of another world. The cracked asphalt under our boots becomes smooth shale.
Then deeper—dark basalt shot through with dream ore glow.
Her grip tightens, but she doesn’t pull back.
“Don’t let go,” she whispers.
“Never,” I vow.
