But I'm not lying on the ground this time.
Instead, I'm watching the fire from someplace above while grief and helplessness claw through me. I want to descend, to search for my body among the ruins, but I find that I can't, no matter how hard I try. I twist and tumble in the dark, weightless one moment and awkwardly heavy the next. No balance or center. No beginning or end. It's a terrifying sensation.
This is what it was like for me.
Another heavy blink, and I return to the present, gasping for clearer air.
Trembling, I ask, “How did you reach me?”
You finally cried out, and so I was born.
I don't remember crying out for her at all.
But something in the shine of her eyes tells me she isn't lying.
I protected you from the flames, she says.Then I found you among the embers. It was all I could do. And I would have stayed at your side as you walked through the ashes of after—but you turned me away.
I don't remember turning her away, either.
Then again, I don't remember much of the immediate aftermath of that night; trauma has a way of deciding for itself what stays, what goes, and then burying the things it can’t make sense of.
My throat tightens. “Why did you save me? Even after I denied you?”
Hope.
I recoil at the word. With the chains at my wrists and the blood on my hands and the wreckage of everything pressing in from every side, it feels like she's mocking me.
“Hope? Whathopecould I possibly carry?” I take a furious step toward her. “Look at me. Look at what I am. Just like you did that night in the arena, when I asked you what you saw when you read my soul—do you remember looking at me then? Do you remember what you said?”
The mist swirls and contracts toward us. We’re still insulated, the world wrapped in eerie silence, but the edges of the camp are beginning to reemerge from the fog.
No clear flames, she recites, staring down at me with those ancient, unreadable eyes.Only embers.
“Exactly.” I can barely get my words out, my pulse hammering in my throat. “And has it changed?”
A long silence.
No.
I laugh once, hollow and short. “Then it is pointless.Weare pointless.”
She says nothing.
“Tell me we aren't.”
She doesn't say anything to this, either.
“We're finished, then. The gods, the divine fires, the bonding, all of it. I want nothing more to do with any of it.” My voice cracks, and I hate myself for the show of weakness. “Nothing more to do withyou.”
The mist disperses all at once, like a candle being snuffed out. As it does, it reveals the crowd of soldiers pressing in, murmuring and exchanging uncertain glances, a few of them reaching for their swords.
Sesca ignores them all, her gaze fixed on me and nothing else. She looks as though she's going to speak, and my entire body tenses at the memory of that divine voice she used earlier. The world seems to be tensing with me, every horse in the camp going silent and still; the wind dropping away to nothing; the campfires drawing in and burning lower in a way that makes no natural sense.
But whatever the dragon has to say, I’m no longer interested in listening.
I turn and trudge back up to the cave without looking back.
Chapter Forty-Five
