Was this what Lucien had felt when he’d succumbed to his fire’s wrath? This level of agony as it built and built andbuilt?
“Lucien!”
He was my balance.
The only force keeping my body from utterly destroying itself.
“Please, Luxin!”
He didn’t respond to either name.
Didn’t open his eyes or blend his blood with mine so we could reverse this awful nightmare.
He just...left me.
Wrath and horror and heartbreak splintered my frozen bones as the world continued to smoke and shatter.
The icy power no longer wanted to share my body. It wanted all of it. All of me.
With a howl of arctic rage, it crested and swallowed me.
I screamed as my heart became a glacier. My veins solidified, my blood crystallised, and my organs became lumps of frosty glass.
I gagged. I cried. I tried to fight—
Another blizzard tore free, tearing toward the stars and ricocheting outward with a storm of icy knives. Silver blood sprayed from my lips. I coughed and choked, quaking beneath pain. I coughed again, raining Lucien in sterling droplets as he lay dead and smoking on the ground.
I folded forward as ice webbed outward beneath my knees, blanketing the earth. I moaned in despair as every tree became a twinkling statue—every burning rock and bramble nothing more than a snow-covered relic.
I screamed again as the ice kept building,building, carving through my veins and tearing through my flesh. Jagged lightningbolts carved their way through my skin, matching the shards tearing through the sky.
I jerked as the power evolved and twisted. I could smell death again. I tasted all the lives that’d ended and knew where every bone rested. The world was littered with mementos and pieces of those who were loved and lost. I felt them decaying. I knew why they’d died and how long they’d been gone.
And the ice fed on those remnants.
It hunted down the whispers of their memories and drank on the tiny echoes of their energy, feeding me, hurting me, driving me closer and closer toward the very death so many had already suffered.
My body contorted as another scream tore through my throat. It became all-consuming, blinding, shoving me into a grave already lined thick with snow.
My broken bones turned to dust beneath the pressure.
I collapsed over Lucien, planting both hands over his metal-encased heart as the fire chose that moment to cremate him. Flames erupted in his hair with their mocking little flickers.
“No...” I clawed at his chest. “Don’t. Please don’t leave me.Stay!”
But that godawful gift inside me already knew. He was gone. I could sense his death. I could tell his spirit had fled, leaving a body empty of his soul.
A body that started disintegrating.
A tremor quaked over his chest as his shredded skin turned powdery with soot.
The fire in him reached critical, burning through whatever was left. With nothing to fuel it—with no more life to sustain it—the flames turned on the very vessel that’d housed them, destroying him from the inside out.
A fleck of ash peeled from his shoulder, drifting upward and spinning silently into the night.
Another followed...and another.
They danced on the wind with cruel mockery, stealing him right before me.
