It doesn’t.
The ringing grows louder. The floor feels too far away. The air tastes sharp and thin, like iron.
Ace.
The name doesn’t come with words. It isn’t a thought. It’s a wound—open and sudden and everywhere at once.
My mouth opens.
No sound comes out.
The room shifts. Or maybe I do. I can’t tell. Time stretches, thins, snaps. Somewhere far away, something crashes—perhaps a chair, perhaps my own knees hitting the floor—but it sounds wrong, like it belongs to someone else.
Then a weight settles at my side. Solid. Familiar.
Vale.
I know him the way I know gravity. Not by sight. By pull.
He’s saying something. His voice reaches me in fragments—edges only. The shape of it. The roughness. He’s trying to steady me, to anchor me, but nothing holds. The world has lost its rules.
Life makes no sense.
Death makes even less.
I clutch at him, fingers locking into fabric, into skin, needing proof that something is still real. His voice finally breaks through—not words, not meaning—just cadence. The same rhythm he used when the pyre collapsed and I couldn’t breathe.
In.
Out.
With me.
I latch onto that sound. That pattern. It’s the only thing that hasn’t shattered. Then his voice changes. Steel slides beneath the tenderness. “Odrin—deal with that guard at once before I have reason to do so.” The command cuts cleanly through the haze. Sharp enough to sting. Sharp enough to wake me a fraction of an inch.
Just enough.
“Mira,” he says again, closer now. “Darling. It’s alright.” The word snaps something in me.
“Alright?” I rasp. The sound is torn raw. “How can it be—Ace?—”
The name collapses in my throat. I can’t finish it. Saying it would make it real, and I don’t think I can survive that yet.
“Ace is alive,” Vale says. Not gentle. Certain. The room lurches again—butthis time, not away. Toward. I force my eyes to his face. Really look. Anger is there. Fear. Control held too tightly. But not the hollow devastation clawing through me.
“The guard—” My breath stutters. “He said?—”
“The guard brought word of Fenloris,” Vale says, disgust thick in every syllable. “He is dead. How remains to be seen.”
He stops himself. Refocuses.
“Ace is still with the healers,” he continues. “I’ve sent someone to him now. This—” He gestures vaguely, like he can’t bear to give Fenloris more shape than necessary. “—this was about the traitor. Not our friend.”
Something in me doesn’t heal. But it loosens. Just enough air returns to burn my lungs. I allow myself to fall—not into Vale or Soria, but backward. The edge of the settee catches me, props me up as I collapse under the weight of everything I’ve just felt.
Still broken. Still folded in on myself.
And yet the world begins to grow edges again. The floor beneath me becomes real. The furniture becomes something solid to brace against. And the people I love begin to come back into focus, as if emerging through smoke.
