Page 59 of The Blood Rites

The world is empty except for the two of us.

And somehow that feels worse.

Kael moves first.

I try to step back, but the mirrored floor turns slick beneath my feet and I fail to gain any distance at all. He stops only a breath away from me, close enough that I can see the silver threaded through his dark eyes. They are not fully black here. Gold glimmers faintly beneath the surface, softening something in him that reality never does.

For one impossible moment, he almost looks hopeful.

Kael says something, but no sound follows.

The silence that replaces it is unbearable. It presses down hard enough to buckle the world around us, and suddenly the mirrored floor fractures beneath my feet.

The Mother Shard speaks.

Her voice tears through the dream with enough force to split the crystal apart in burning lines of pink and gold. Cracks race outwards beneath us, shattering our reflections into jagged fragments.

But beneath her voice, there is another: quieter, distant, pushing upwards like something drowning beneath deep water.

I strain to hear it.

The dream shifts violently around me as I focus. Kael’s hand remains against my face and, without thinking, I lean into the touch.

His expression changes instantly, fear flashing across his face.

His fingers drag suddenly downwards, nails no longer human but sharpened into dark talons that rake across my skin. He is staring past me now, somewhere over my shoulder, and the second voice rises at last, warped and broken beneath the waterlogged pull of the dream.

lost. lost. lost.

the children are lost.

the bridge is broken.

the blood. wrong. wrong.

communion shattered.

where are you.

where is your other. the other.

I try to speak, but water fills my mouth instead. My lungs seize. I am drowning.

Beneath me, the mirrored floor begins to collapse into a vast black depth, but Kael catches my wrist before I can fall.

The Mother Shard’s voice crashes through the dream again.

“Show me,” she demands.

The entire world shakes.

“SHOW ME.”

But the second voice refuses to be silenced. It fights back, ragged and desperate:

not one.

not one.