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They came for me. Sola protected me. But I burned the page too late; they were already hunting us long before I ever touched the fire.

My lungs stop working properly, drawing in a breath and getting nothing back no matter how hard I try.

The room feels too small, too hot, the kitchen table blurring with Ma’s voice while my pulse starts hammering hard enough to hurt. The air catches somewhere in my chest, refusing to go any deeper, and numbness creeps into my fingers.

“Rowan?” Pa sounds closer.

I can’t answer him, can’t explain that something is wrong. But something is… very wrong.

The floor drops beneath my feet as my heartbeat keeps stumbling over itself, every pulse landing wrong. Dread pools low in my gut.

Something is happening. Something bad.

The realization hits harder than the panic.

Not now.

Please, not now.

I hit the wall beside the kitchen table hard enough to rattle the frame hanging above it, each breath slipping away before I can pull enough air in again. The room swims.

Wake up.

Wake up.

But I can’t breathe. My heartbeat keeps skipping wrong inside my chest, stuttering until pain spreads sharply beneath my ribs. The room lurches around me again, and I clutch at my throat even though I know that’s not where the problem is. Every attempt to breathe seems to make it worse.

Panic crashes through me fast enough to make my hands start shaking.

“Not him too,” Ma sobs somewhere behind me.

“Rowan.” Pa’s hands clamp down on my shoulders, forcing me to look at him while my lungs seize up completely. “Look at me, son. Breathe.”

I try, fixing my eyes on his face and counting through the panic the way Sola taught me when I was little.

One breath. Two.

“Look at me, Rowan.”

The words drag up the memory of Sola sitting beside me and talking me through nightmares and scraped knees and every other disaster she somehow always knew how to fix.

You’re okay.

I’m not.

You are.

I’m not.

Then keep breathing until you are.

My sister’s gone. And for the first time in my life, she isn’t coming back to fix this.

My vision shakes, but I focus on Pa’s face, on his hands, on the sound of his voice. My throat feels completely locked and my heartbeat keeps slamming beneath my ribs like it’s trying to tear its way out of my chest.

Then the room pitches sideways.

Pa curses and reaches for me just as my knees finally give out. “Light, Rowan⁠—”