Page 149 of The Immortal’s Mark

“Guards.” My voice cuts through the chamber. The remaining ministers are backing toward the walls, terror on their faces, and I need them out. I need to understand what is happening. I need—

No response.

The guards at the doors have fallen. Every one of them. The chamber is littered with bodies now, breathing but empty, and I am alone at the center of it with the cold pressing in and the bond going strange and the shadows pooling darker in every corner.

I reach for the dragon fire.

It has lived in me since I was twelve years old—since I walked into the heart of a fire and emerged changed, bonded, carrying a piece of Tianlong’s ancient flame in my blood. I have called it a thousand times. In battle. In ceremony. In the quiet moments when I need to remind myself what I am.

The fire sparks.

Sputters.

Dies.

Something is eating it. Something is swallowing the flame before it can catch, consuming the heat the way the cold is consuming everything else, and I cannot—

I reach for Tianlong. What is happening?

He is here. The words come fractured, broken, like Tianlong is fighting to push them through a barrier of stone. The Hungering—he is here—I cannot—

I reach for the doors.

They are not there.

I stop. Stare. Where the great bronze doors of the throne room have stood for more years than I can count, there is only wall. Smooth stone, unmarked, as if the doors have never existed at all. The windows are gone too. The chamber has become a cage, sealed, complete, and I am trapped inside it with the cold and the dark and the bodies of my court breathing their empty breaths around me.

Her name rises without permission.

The woman who sleeps in my chambers and laughs at my poetry and makes me want things I have spent twenty-two years refusing to want.

“Lián—”

I get the first syllable out.

The shadows move.

I do not wait for them to reach me.

The dragon fire will not answer, but I am not only fire. I am years of training, of battle, of learning to survive when survival should be impossible. My sword clears its sheath before conscious thought catches up—a blade I have carried since my coronation, steel folded a thousand times by the empire’s finest smiths, edge sharp enough to split a hair.

I swing at the nearest shadow.

The blade passes through darkness like smoke and comes out the other side trailing nothing. No resistance. No impact. I might as well have struck at fog.

The shadows continue their advance.

I back toward the throne, sword raised, mind racing through options. The doors are gone. The fire will not come. Tianlong’s voice is fading in my head, going distant, and I do not let myself think about what that means. There must be something. There must be a way—

Ren—

His voice breaks through, ragged, and I have never heard Tianlong sound like this. Not even when we faced the rebellion, when assassins breached the palace, when I took an arrow through the shoulder and felt him scream with shared pain.

He is cutting us apart.

I feel it then. The bond—that thread of fire and consciousness that has connected us since I was twelve—is fraying. I can feel it the way I would feel a rope around my wrist being sawed through strand by strand. Something ancient and patient is working at the connection, severing it with surgical precision, and Tianlong is—

Little flame—I cannot—