I ease him back into a sitting position, giving him a small smile as I take a final look at his new appearance.
I don’t know how Milena could say he looked like Malak.
Every part of Thaden’s features, from his dark eyes to his jaw and even the crease in his forehead, all are alive with feeling.
“Asha,” he says, reaching for me, even though his hand doesn’t make it halfway up before he has to lower it. “When you come back from this, will you do something else for me?”
I’m not returning from this. I nearly say so, and then I stop.
He knows.
The solemn tilt of his head and the way his lips press together, the sadness in his expression, tells me so.
“Whatever it is, ask me when I come back,” I whisper.
Scooping up a pair of tongs from the workbench, I deposit the dragon device into the toolbox and hold the box close as I hurry away.
Back along the corridor to the little chamber that sent me into the darkness last time.
Before I step into it, I upend the pouch I was carrying into the toolbox, too, the wolf device that was used on Erik clanking softly as it hits the others.
I count the pieces. They’re all there now.
Malak’s hammer and medallions. Thaden’s hammer and medallions. And all the devices that brought so much pain.
Along with them is my grandmother’s pin. A single bright spot amid the pieces of dark metal.
Taking a deep breath, I cut my finger on the blade at the side of the chamber and let the darkness take me.
Chapter 49
Ash and dust choke me.
I open my eyes to the vast plain that stretches around me, to the tornados of crimson dirt that whip at the air and monstrous beasts that crash against each other in the distance.
I can barely breathe. All I can do is take short, sharp gasps while the scent of blood and death threatens to drive every rational thought from my mind.
You don’t need to feel afraid.
The whisper reaches me across the wind, far closer to me than it was the first time I was pulled here.
A woman’s figure takes shape within the darkness, sections of dust peeling from the sides of tornados, ash rising from the ground, all of it pulling together to construct her body. Ash streams across her head and down her sides like hair.
This darkness belongs to you.
She glides toward me, her features all too clear. A mirror to my darkest fears.
She is me.
“Take control,” she whispers. “Shape the living to your needs. Command the dead to do your bidding. Fight the old?—”
“Find the new,” I say, rising to my full height. “Oh, I will.”
I will create something that has never existed before.
A keeper of all the magics.
A keeper who will wear a dark crown and live forever in a prison.
