Page 145 of The Blood Rites

A voice shouts my name: “LUCERIS,” but it sounds like an indictment.

I try to shut my eyes, but they won’t close.

The next instant, the pink woman lunges. Her arms elongate, fusing into a glistening blade that slices through my body, shearing me in half and throwing me backwards, away from myself.

Time stutters and doubles so that I see myself split in half and flung away a dozen times at once.

I hit something—and reality changes. I am pieced back together in the Light Dominion. In my room in the dorms. A place so ramshackle and empty—and impossibly safe compared to this.

I am lying on the floor. My wrists are shackled in gold bands—no, not gold. Inhibitium. Two of them, layered, and both covered in so many golden cracks, light leaking through like blood through a bandage. It’s my light, and it hurts to look at it.

The room is filled with the other Offerings. They line the walls, silent and watching. Their eyes are all wrong, each pair holding a different accusation. I do not know if they can see me. If they even truly exist.

Something moves in the circle of bodies. A boy—Kael, no, the false Kael. He smiles like he knows me. His body is too precise—assembled from my feverish memories rather than truth. His eyes are black and endless but lack his warmth. He steps forward, movements like liquid. He doesn’t look at me, but at the bands on my wrists. His mouth is a thin line of disappointment.

He raises a hand and shadows pour from his fingertips. They gurgle and spit until they settle into the form of a blade, like the pink woman’s.

I want to speak. I want to tell him I forgive him. That I—

That I’m falling in love with him. That none of this is real.

But my tongue is a dead thing, and my lungs have no air.

The false Kael plunges the shadow blade into my chest. Not my heart—just below it. Precise. Clinical. Like a medic cutting toward something hidden. The blade slides in without resistance. My veins fill with fire. My nerves combust. I would scream if I could.

In the silence, a voice—a real one, not warped or underwater, but clear, almost gentle—whispers in my ear:

“You need to die.”

Then everything stops.

I come to upside down, swinging from a vine with the taste of blood in my mouth. My head is pounding, my skull ready to split. For a moment, I don’t know who or where I am. There is only pressure, throbbing and vicious, like my brain is about to drain out of my nose.

Then I remember: the dorm, the blade, his voice telling me I needed to die.

But I didn’t. Not yet.

I blink, and the world makes no sense. A blue-black forest. Night air dense and pulsing with Mana. Trees crowd in every direction—old, gnarled roots crawl over the ground, the foliage thick and alive. The canopy blocks out the sky but glows faintly, as if the stars are dripping onto the branches.

Thousands of glittering sprites flit through the air, a sickly yellow. Each one the size of a teardrop, drifting without purpose, giving the night a surreal, almost underwater quality. The air hums with their presence. Every breath fills my lungs with a mixture of sweet nectar cut with rot.

My ankles are bound tight by a living, throbbing vine. My hands are free, but the rest of me is trapped, swinging gently like bait.

My first thought is Kael.

The warmth he left behind when we fell asleep together is already distant. Already gone. He is not here. My chest lurches, and I bite my tongue to keep from screaming his name into the dark.

My next thought is Marissa.

I scan the trees, but the darkness is dense, and the sprites’ glow only bends the world out of shape. I see nothing.

I twist, but that only makes the vine bite deeper into my skin. I reach for my Mana, and it’s there, waiting, refreshed and untethered after the Embrace. My hands glow faintly, illuminating the rough skin at my wrists where my bands always chafed. I was shackled again in the dream. As if they ever had any real hold over me.

I gather the light in my palms, focusing it into my fingertips. There is no one around, so I aim a beam of searing light at the vine. It sizzles, then pops, and I fall hard, landing on my shoulder and rolling to a stop against the base of a massive tree.

A few feet above me, a Shadowborn is staring at me.

I freeze, ready to die.