Chapter 1
Thane
Dark.
Then not.
My eyes open to ash falling like snow.
For a moment I don’t understand where I am. The sky is wrong—too bright, too silver, fractured with light that shouldn’t exist. My chest doesn’t move. My heart doesn’t beat.
Then it does.
One brutal thud that cracks through my ribs like a fist.
I gasp. Choke. Claw at the dirt beneath me as my lungs remember how to work.
Dead.
The word surfaces before I can stop it.
I was dead. Not unconscious. Not fading.Gone.
I know the difference. I’ve walked the edge of it for centuries, fed from the dying, tasted the exact moment when life becomes absence. What I felt wasn’t sleep.
It was nothing.
And then something dragged me back.
I force myself onto my elbows. The world tilts, stabilizes, tilts again. Blood in my mouth. Dirt under my nails. The thick, low hum of Ether gathering—too much of it, pressure building against my teeth like a coming storm.
Where is she?
My vision sharpens.
The courtyard is chaos. Bodies scattered across scorched ground. Some moving. Some not. The silver veins in the earth pulse like exposed arteries, brighter than I’ve ever seen them.
Then I find her.
Bree.
She’s kneeling in the center of it all, hands buried in the dirt, head bowed. Silver mist pours from her like blood from an open wound—not curling, not drifting.Flooding.It streams into the veins beneath her, feeding something vast and hungry.
And ten feet in front of her—
Riley.
Kneeling the same way. Hands pressed to the ground. Black-silver Ether erupting from her palms, streaming toward Bree’s light like a mirror reflection reaching for its source. Their magic meets in the space between them, twisting together, shadow and silver becoming something I don’t have a name for.
Two halves of the same soul, facing each other across scorched earth.
My chest seizes.
I know what this is.
I’ve seen it once before. Centuries ago. A Source who gave too much. Who pushed everything she had into the world and burned herself hollow in the process.
She didn’t survive.
