Amelia gasps, her body arching against mine, eyes flying open in shock. The air in the chamber turns glacial in a singlebreath. The hearthlight gutters, flames bending sideways as if caught in a wind that does not exist.
Power surges through the bond like a blade dragged across bone. I feel it slice.
“Zeidan—” she starts, but her voice fractures as darkness blooms beneath her skin.
It begins at the mark on her throat. The place I claimed. The skin there blackens, not burned, not bruised, but veined with something deeper, ink spreading beneath glass. Sigils ignite along the air around her body, not Nytherian, not Vrakken. Older. Angular. Starved.
The shadows in the room do not lengthen. They crawl. They peel themselves off the walls and coil toward her, not obeying me, not answering my call.
Wrong.
This is wrong.
I move instantly, shadow exploding outward from my spine, wings tearing into existence with a violent crack of displaced air. The chamber shudders under the force of it. I wrap both arms around her, pulling her tight against my chest as if I can anchor her by sheer will.
The floor beneath us fractures with a sound like splitting ice.
A circle of dark light erupts under the bed, no fire, no flame, just absence. A wound in space itself. The air smells of iron and rot and distant stone.
Teleportation. No…extraction. Someone has keyed into the bond. Amelia screams, and it is not pain, it is separation. The bond stretches. Stretches. I feel it thinning, drawn through something cold and intelligent and patient.
“Not her,” I snarl, power detonating outward. Shadow slams against the dark circle, colliding with it in a shower of black sparks. The wards of the chamber ignite in response, runes blazing gold along the walls.
The intruding magic does not retreat. It tightens.
Amelia’s fingers claw into my shoulders, her nails biting through fabric into skin. Her eyes lock on mine.
“Don’t let?—”
The words are ripped away as her body lifts. Not upward. Inward. As if the darkness beneath us has teeth.
I lunge, wings snapping forward, claws slashing into the void. I feel resistance, something solid and vast on the other side of that tear.
A presence that is watching and calculating.
Malrend.
Rage erupts through me so violently the chamber windows shatter outward. My power floods the room in a tidal wave, crushing furniture, cracking stone, turning the air thick with shadow.
I grab her wrist. For one heartbeat…I have her.
The bond blazes white-hot between us, brighter than I have ever felt it, a desperate bridge of light cutting through the dark. Her fingers tighten around mine. Then the void pulls again. Stronger. And my grip slips.
Her body dissolves into shards of dark light, scattering like broken glass into the wound in the floor.
The circle implodes. The chamber goes silent. My hands close on empty air. The bond does not break, but it thins. Drawn far away. Alive, but distant.
I remain kneeling in the wreckage, wings fully unfurled, shadow raging around me with nowhere to strike. I sit still for a second trying to process what happened.
My hands curl into fists as fury locks into something lethal and clear. They have taken her. He kidnapped her right from under me. And I will burn the world down to get her back.
30
AMELIA
Iwake slowly, but not gently. Consciousness returns to me in measured layers, each one colder than the last. The air is unnaturally still, stripped of the subtle living currents that usually hum beneath Nytheria’s breath.
There is no rustle of leaves, no distant murmur of roots shifting beneath soil. Instead, the silence is deliberate, engineered, pressed into place by layered wards that dampen resonance and swallow stray magic before it can bloom.
