“The only way you’re getting there is in my embrace, lover,” she smirks.
The Golden Son drops his head, shaking it as disbelief flickers over his face. Yet he doesn’t resist. Instead, he steps forward, reluctant but resigned, as Zyphoro smiles victoriously. She seizes his waist, yanking him tight with a force that wrenches a gasp from his chest. He grumbles in frustration, but she only laughs and launches from the deck, their bodies swallowed by cloud, her cackle echoing like a banshee on the wind.
“I almost pity him,” Solena muses with a sly grin. It draws the faintest curve of one from Orios and, despite myself, from me.
The levity dies quickly. Orios turns grave. “We cannot carry Reon and Amara as easily. We risk breaking the time loop…” His voice falters when he meets my eyes. “We could lose her.”
“Gather the Blades. Meet me at the Grove. I will get Reon and Amara there.”
They exchange a questioning glance, but I offer no explanation. There is no time, no strength for words.
“Go. Now,” I order, clipped and final.
Solena’s lips part, ready to spill concern, but Orios stills her. He tightens his grip on her hand, lifts it, and presses his lips to her knuckles with quiet reverence. It silences her doubts.
“Yes, Rook,” he says.
He bends, allowing Solena to pull his helm into place. His face vanishes beneath its shroud, smoke curling over his armor until he is no longer just a male but a Reaper, born of shadow and war. Solena’s runes flare, black wings bursting from her back in a sleek, deadly unfurl. Orios follows suit, his wings spanning so wide she is nearly swallowed whole in their shadow.
“We will meet you in the Grove,” Solena says, and then they soar together, their forms climbing higher, two streaks of shadow slicing across the perfect blue sky.
I stand motionless, and though it lasts only a breath, in that breath lies an eternity, an eternity where doubt knots my limbs, where fear threatens to rip me apart. Before it can burrow deeper, I turn sharply, boots pounding across the deck. The cabin door groans under my hand as I throw it open so hard it nearly shatters against its hinges.
They are exactly as I left them. My friend. My love.Reon’s skin is almost as pale as Amara’s now, his very life bleeding away to feed the loop that holds her tethered to this world. Orios was right: I cannot carry them both. And I cannot risk pulling them apart, not when Amara clings to that fragile thread of existence.
So I must call on the only thing left to me.
My power. My curse.
The darkness that whispers in my blood.
With a flick of my hand, the air rends open. A jagged wound tears through the cabin, a slice of reality itself unspooling. Beyond it yawns the void, endless, silent, grave-dark.Reon does not stir, too bound to the loop. Amara does not move, frozen in her fragile stasis, and from the void, something comes.
Two figures emerge. Insubstantial, smoke and shadow barely given form. Wisps trailing, they still carry the unmistakable shape of arms, of grasping fingers, of cowled heads and long, drifting robes. They glide in eerie unison, their gestures mirrored, their movements in perfect, unnatural accord.
They break from the void and stop before me, faceless heads bowed.
My heart thunders, but I force my steps toward the bed where Amara lies. My hand trembles as I reach for her, and sparks lash across my skin from the barrier that holds her. I hiss, withdrawing. No time to waste. No room for failure.
I turn to the specters and nod once.
They bow, still faceless, still insubstantial. Then their bodies unravel.
The edges of their shadowy robes shred into streamers of smoke, each strand twisting and lengthening as though caught on some unseen wind. Their arms contort, fingers elongating, fusing into skeletal limbs that snap and bend until they resemble legs, not Fae or human legs, but the spindly, bone-thin forelimbs of some nightmare beast. Their torsos split, stretching impossibly, their hoods collapsing inward as the shadow pours forward, reshaping into the outline of elongated skulls. Hollow sockets gape where eyes should be, burning faintly with ash-pale light.
A low, unnatural sound escapes them, not quite a neigh, not quite a scream, but both at once. The resonance vibrates through the cabin, rattling its beams. Their chests heave as ribs force themselves into existence, formed of shadow one moment, skeletal the next, then gone again in a swirl of smoke. Veins of darkness ripple down their sides, hardening into flanks that glisten like oil in starlight.
Their tails writhe first as tendrils, then snap into lashing whips of smoke. Their hooves take form last, slabs of black fire solidifying with a sound like cracking stone. Each stomp splinters the deck beneath them, though when I glance, the wood bears no mark, as though reality itself refuses to acknowledge their weight.
By the time their transformation is complete, the robed phantoms are gone, replaced by two massive steeds wrought entirely of shadow and despair. Their manes whip like storm-clouds, their mouths drip smoke instead of breath, and their eyes burn like pale dying stars.
I flick my wrist, and a swell of smoke surges to life, curling and twisting. It engulfs Reon and Amara, swallowing them whole, and for a moment they vanish in darkness. Then the smoke thins, revealing them wrapped within its writhing tendrils, lashes of shadow clinging to the spectral steeds.
“Go!”
The command rips from me, and they obey. The steeds rear, their hooves cracking like thunder, their haunting whinnies tearing the silence as they charge into the dark, taking Reon and Amara with them.
My wings snap open, each beat heavy with the cries of a thousand lost souls and then I surge forward, into the wound I carved, into the void itself, black lightning lancing through eternity.
