She defined them.
Tell us who you are,demanded the darkness.
Tears blurred her vision. Her voice strengthened. “I am Elyria Lightbreaker. The Revenant. And I may have been left broken, but I am not so easily shattered.”
She flexed her hands. The shadows stilled. Then they flowed back into her, the chaos settling, melding with the wild magic in her blood. Her fingertips tingled. The luminous warmth of her magic mingled with the cool tendrils of shadow...and something new emerged.
New, and yet also, somehow, familiar.
Something balanced.
The darkness wasn’t gone. She could still feel it there, in that pit deep inside her. But it was no longer a suffocating weight. It was no longer some feral, sleeping beast she feared waking. It no longer felt like an enemy.
It felt like power. No longer divided, but whole.
Her power.
Strength flowed through Elyria’s veins like wildfire, raw and unfiltered.
Hers to wield. Hers to shape. Hers to command.
The blood-soaked battlefield around her began to flicker, the illusion unraveling. Elyria stood tall, her wings unfurling in a blaze of shimmering color that matched the aurora dancing overhead. The twisted landscape of smoke and death dissolved into mist. And she was left standing alone in the void once more, whole and steady.
That was the moment she felt it. A pulse of fear. A distanttug.
A voice called to her through the endless nothing.
And then she was falling—through the void, through memories, through illusions.
Her nose stung with the acrid scent of smoke. The crackle of burning wood filled her ears. Elyria stood facing a blazing cottage, the entire front wall collapsed. Amidst the flames, she could make out a small table, some overturned chairs. And there, in the center of the open room, curled up in a ball on the floor as fire danced around him, was Cedric Thorne.
24
THROUGH THE FIRE
CEDRIC
Cold.
He was so cold.
And yet, heat was everywhere. Cedric could feel the flames licking his skin as the cottage burned. He didn’t know where the man had gone, the wielder of shadow and blood. The one who’d torn his beautiful, kind mother from this life. There were no bodies. Not the mangled, charred intruders. Not Cedric’s father, bloody and brutalized on the floor.
Cedric wasn’t even sure his own body was there. If it was, it was no longer the six-year-old frame he’d been trapped inside, unable to speak his thoughts or move of his own accord as he relived the worst night of his existence.
Cedric was alone.
Cold and so, so alone.
And then, suddenly, he wasn’t.
A voice stretched through the haze—soft, lyrical. It wove between the crackling flames and wisps of smoke. Familiar. Comforting in a way that made Cedric’s raw nerves settle for the first time since this nightmare began.
“You’re all right,” the voice murmured. “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
Cedric’s head throbbed. He closed his eyes, but the images of what he’d just seen—the memories—were seared behind his eyelids.
Soft singing filled his ears, cutting through the phantom screams in his head. He didn’t know the song, but as he felt a hand on his back, moving in slow, concentric circles, Cedric’s thudding heart calmed ever so slightly.
