Page 185 of Fallen Nocturne

I sit up too quickly. “Darstan? Siofra?”

Only the empty desert answers. It stretches out around me exactly as it always has, silent and unchanged. I sit alone in the thin shadow of a rock and understand that I conjured them from whatever is left of my mind. My exhausted brain invented the people I needed most to keep me breathing.

This should feel pathetic.

It doesn’t.

Instead, it feels like proof that even here, even broken down to almost nothing, some part of me is still fighting.

A hollow ache opens inside me at Darstan and Siofra’s absence, but the strength they gave me remains. I push myself upright and step back into the heat.

“Svenn!” I call. “Svenn, can you hear me?”

My voice carries across the ash-sand and disappears.

Death appears beside me once more. “Still calling?”

“Svenn!”

“Perhaps he does not want to be found.”

My eyes burn, and grief rises so suddenly that I nearly choke on it.

Death watches me closely. “Perhaps he heard you and chose not to answer. Perhaps death has given him peace from the burdens of loving you.”

The words sink into me like a splinter. My eyes fill and I let them, because there’s no point pretending anymore. Tears spill down my face. For one terrible moment, I want to curl into the sand and weep until there is nothing left inside me.

Instead, I draw another breath and scream his name anyway.

“Svenn!”

Death sighs. “He is gone, Rhianelle.”

“Svenn!”

“He cannot hear you.”

“Svenn!”

My throat tears around his name, but I keep calling. I call until I can barely hear my own voice, until tears and ash blur the entire realm into gray.

Then something moves behind Death. My heart lurches into my throat.

A tall, dark figure steps through the haze. His black hair lashes across his face, and fury burns in eyes I would know in any life.

Death begins to turn.

Svenn’s hand shoots out faster than I can blink. He grabs Death by the throat.

Chapter 26 Svenn

Everything is gray in the realm of the dead, from the sand beneath my feet to the sky above. An endless stretch of nothing that surrounds me on all sides.

I don’t remember how I got here. But I know I’m fucking dead. I pass other souls. They wander like I do. A few sit in the ash-sand, staring at nothing. None of them speak or look at each other. We’re alone together in this vast, empty place.

I should feel something about this. Fear or anger maybe, despair.

But I feel nothing. I remember nothing of my life except for my name, Arescaine Darian Andras. The rest of my memory has been hollowed out from my brain.