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An immense pressure scorched through his back. Draven gagged, choking on a liquid rising up his throat and dripping past his lips. He released Valen, wiping the dribble away with a finger.

Blood. Why was he bleeding?

He stumbled to his feet, feeling weight and pain in his back and chest. He looked down, finding the steel of a blade stabbed through the left side of his chest.

Draven almost laughed.

When he managed to turn around, he met Caine’s blank face. No tears stained his cheeks, nor did regret fill his eyes.

Draven dropped to his knees, too weak to remove the glaive. Every breath grew shorter, strained. Warmth crawled up his throat as the souls within him vacated their prison. First, the golden flame of the Guardian floated past his vision, then the orange of the Gnaw, and finally the green of the Serpent.

His vision grew dark, and for a while, it extinguished completely.

Then it ignited in a virid wildfire. Life returned to him too fast, too strong. It pummeled at his body, coiling around every limb and squeezing until he was numb.

It released, and his pulse pounded against his skin, warm and euphoric. He drew in a gasp of air, but his head spun, and he collapsed face first to the ash smeared stone. As he lay there, skirting the line between life and death, shadows thrashed, and screams echoed beyond his sight. And just before everything went black, Caine’s limp body dropped to the ground beside him.

Eyes empty.

Chapter Four

Draven was sure his eyes were open, but all he saw was black. He lay still, blinking until he was certain he was awake—just in a dark room.

“He’s up!”

A woman’s voice split across his skull.

He groaned, palming his forehead. What happened?

Slowly, the answer returned to him in stride with his memories. The night he took the Serpent. Valen. Caine. The moment he—

Footsteps poured into the room.

And then there was the man who woke him. The blue eyed stranger who looked to be Terin—a people from Zaitrerin on the southern end of Eocera. Someone who had no place in the Reapers’ War.

Questions and curiosities pummeled against Draven’s headache, every one demanding answers. Through the discomfort, all he could manage was to pick at a thin fabric now covering his body.

“You dressed me,” he mumbled, mimicking the tongue of the woman.

The man he spoke with earlier, Kyer, responded, “Of course. Not very polite of me to leave you naked on a cave floor.”

Draven grunted a small, appreciative sound. “Don’t touch me again.”

“As you wish.” Kyer chuckled. “I didn’t know you spoke Cera.”

Draven’s assumption that it was the common language of the continent Eocera was correct, though it was so informal he almost didn’t recognize it. “I grew up here.”

“Is that right? I always thought you were secluded to Reatia,” Kyer mused, a smile obvious in his voice. “Wish I knew that. I would’ve spared you the pain of my Retian.”

Draven clenched the shirt. Now that he was more level headed, he fumbled to connect the few pieces he had before questioning Kyer.

He had tried to kill his father before he ended up here. The feeling in his chest still remained—the anger, the indestructible resolve to do it. He couldn’t recall what brought him to that point, but he remembered he failed.

Caine stopped him, and according to Kyer, Draven killed him in return.

He clenched his eyes shut, driving back the sting of tears.

And before that…