“Make it count, Elle,” I tell her.
My eyes close, a heavy tiredness soaking into every cell of my being.
Her hands are on me. I can feel the heat of her, clutching me close. Holding me together even as I fall away.
A spark of regret flares in the hole in my chest, that flickering light pulsing one final time, an echo of all the things I wish could have been different.
But I’m already slipping, too far gone to stop it now. I’ve gone too far.
And this is a place she cannot follow.
The tether behind my ribs strains, stretches—please—I want to hold on, I want to reach for her—no—I don’t want to go yet, I?—
The thread snaps.
54
A GOLDEN CROWN
ELYRIA
He lookedlike he was sleeping.
If it weren’t for the blood growing cold against Elyria’s skin, she might have thought he was.
She was soaked in it, a thick layer of red coating her hands, pooling in her lap, creeping up the bandage still wrapped around her arm. There was so much of it. Too much.
Bile rose in the back of her throat.
This wasn’t real.
It couldn’t be.
This couldn’t be how it all ended.
He promised. He swore that he wouldn’t be the causeof her pain again.
He lied.
Elyria’s vision blurred, her racing mind going still and silent as she searched for that golden thread, that warm, familiartugin her chest, that thing that had led her to him time and time again. She’d used it to pull him back from the brink before, and she would do so again.
It wasn’t there.
She could barely breathe. She knelt, frozen fingers slackening where they clutched the black fabric of Cedric’s tunic. She should’ve been sobbing, screaming, something.
She did nothing, felt nothing.
Only the void of him.
She looked at the dagger lodged in Cedric’s lifeless chest, saw the river of red pouring from the crimson jewel in its pommel. It was as if it were painting his body with the lifeblood of all who had come before him—died before him. The lives lost to the Crucible.
She barely noticed the aurora starting to undulate in the sky above, ribbons of swirling color weaving, dancing, condensing, until they formed a single beam of rainbow light that descended on the pedestal in the center of the amphitheater.
Elyria lifted her head as the light faded, her eyes falling on what was left behind. The thing that Cedric gave his life for. That all who had taken on the Crucible gave their lives for.
The crown.
Only it wasn’t a crown.
