Ezzy. Neeve. Everyone is gone.
Only the Shaman and I remain.
“What’s happening?”My words come out thin and wrong.“What is this?”
I turn again, and the world turns with me.
The cliffs begin to bend and sway like they’re breathing, and the fire at the centre of the circle starts stretching wider and wider until it spills across the ground and claws its way up the cliff-sides only to roar back down in rivers of liquid red and orange. The molten flames rush over the green slopes, consuming the moss, rocks, everything in their path until the whole mountain is burning around me.
Heat slams into my face, smoke tearing down my throat, and through it all the Shaman keeps singing.
Louder.
Faster.
Except the song doesn’t sound the same anymore.
It warps. Pulls thin. The notes twisting into something raw and jagged that scrapes against my skull, like nails on a chalkboard, until I can’t tell where the music ends and the screaming begins.
But the screaming isn’t hers.
It’s mine.
It’s Mums.
And I swear I can feel it now—the magic, the juice, the dragons, whatever this is—sliding beneath my skin with a kind of hungry awareness and suddenly I’m not in the clearing anymore. I’m at the door.
Her door.
“Mum,”I choke, as time and space warp around me, hours folding into minutes as I pull and pull.“I’m sorry, I didn't mean to?—”
But my hands are too small and my nails break against the hot wood while her screams continue to pour into me, floodingmy veins, tearing through every Thread until there’s nowhere for them to go except out through the tears burning down my face.
Panting through the smoke clogging the air, night and day begin to smear together until time stops meaning anything at all, and then suddenly the door flies open.
But she’s not behind it.
There is no room.
No body.
Only the Citadel courtyard, stretching endlessly beneath a red sky.
No. No. She was there. I was so close. I could have reached her. I could have saved her.
My eyes stinging now, I blink against the blistering heat as the blaze circles me on every side.
Through the courtyard, I can see the moat that encases us, only the dark water has been replaced by flames, spilling over the stone edge, bleeding like melted gold and spreading through the four Veins of Power into the realms beyond.
At first, I think it’s dragon-fire.
Then I look down to see Threads lashing from my trembling fingers, bright and wild.
No.
No, no, no.
I shake them, willing them to stop, but they simply grow, stoking, feeding the inferno higher and higher.
