You’re morbid.
Still didn’t stop me from clambering up the small ridge and moving around the chunk of glacier until I could see its face. The frozen water distorted it...
Was it a jaguar?
A lion?
I tipped forward, my heart aching,aching.
I staggered as I lost my balance.
My hand landed on the animal’s haunches.
Disgust ripped through me at the icy wetness—the eerie firmness of a body that hadn’t decomposed and—
Afloodof memories slammed into me.
The lab. The tests. The pain.
Cinderkeep, Ashfall Cliff, revenge, love, and loss.
Fresh agony tore through my heart as I doubled over.
Everythingunravelled.
I saw the past that’d ticked onward while I’d been sleeping.
I witnessed every day of history as the wheel of time spun, blurring decades into a single stream of thousands of days and hundreds of years. An endless carousel of glaciers retreating, rivers carving new paths, land rising, mountains falling. Of humans coming and going. Of technology flourishing and failing. Of Dillon growing old and Whisper aging right alongside him. I saw funerals and births. Sunsets and sunrises. Life turning and twisting, burning and freezing, all while I’d been somewhereelse.
And through it all.
Through every night and every year, Whisper had stayed.
He’d somehow known where I was and guarded me, protected me—waiting for me to open my damn eyes and find him.
“Fuck, Whisp...” My throat closed over as I studied my friend. Even frozen in ice and preserved in death, I recognised every line of his massive frame.
This was Whisper.
My oldest friend. My constant shadow. The one who stayed with me through every hell.
A broken sound tore from my throat as I dropped to my knees, landing in a puddle of water from his thawing. Grabbing his back paw, I pressed my forehead to his hock. “Wake up, you stupid beast. Come back to me.”
Centuries of grief and loneliness tore through me.
The fire answered with a roar—surging outward, hot and wild and angry. Golden flames exploded across my skin, smacking intothe ice encasing Whisper. The glacier melted, hissing and cracking, thick steam billowing into the sky.
Whisper’s frozen body tumbled outward in an awkward sprawl, landing on top of the human skeleton.
I bent to shift him off the bones, but the flames in my blood had a different idea. A funnel of golden fire spiralled toward the sky before exploding like a giant firework. Tendrils of power darted across the landscape as if hunting...searching.
I collapsed as the fire woke up the final piece of me.
The vault of memories that my heart shielded me from because remembering fuckingbrokeme.
Rook.
The rest of my past came back. The dreamscape. Rook’s final sacrifice. Her body shattering in my arms—
