Page 150 of The Immortal’s Mark

Hold on. I do not know if I say it or think it. HOLD ON.

I am trying—I am trying—

I can feel him fighting. Through what remains of the bond, I can feel Tianlong throwing himself against whatever barrier has risen between us. Three thousand years of power and will and ancient fire, hurling itself against a wall of shadow. I feel his rage. His fear. His desperate, clawing need to reach me.

It is not enough.

REN—

The bond tears.

There is no other word for it. Something that has been part of me since I was a child—something so fundamental to my existence that I cannot remember who I was before it—rips free like a limb being torn from its socket. I feel it go. I feel the moment the connection breaks, the instant the fire that has burned in my blood for twenty-two years gutters and dies.

The shadows close. I swing again, uselessly, and the blade dissolves in my hands. Simply dissolves. Metal becoming ash becoming nothing, running through my fingers like black sand. I drop the hilt and back against the throne, and the cold is everywhere now, pressing in from all sides, and Tianlong’s voice is going to static, to fragments, to—

Ren—

I reach for him. In my mind, in my soul, in whatever part of me the bond lives in. I reach the way I have reached a thousand times before, across the distance between us, through the fire that connects us, and I find—

Nothing.

The bond goes dark.

I have never been alone in my head. Not since I was twelve years old. Not since I walked into a mountain and walked out changed, carrying a piece of something ancient and magnificent in my consciousness. Twenty-two years of his voice. His commentary. His insufferable amusement at everything I do. His wisdom when I need it and his silence when I do not and the constant, steady presence of another soul alongside my own. I have complained about his intrusions for years. His unsolicited observations. The way he comments on my heartbeat and my breathing and the things I refuse to say out loud. I have wished, in moments of particular annoyance, for five minutes of quiet. For a single thought that is entirely my own.

I did not know.

I did not know that his voice is the sound of not being alone. That his presence—irritating, invasive, inescapable—is the only thing standing between me and a loneliness so vast I cannot comprehend its edges. That the fire he gave me is not just power, not just the ability to summon flame, but warmth itself. Connection. The knowledge that whatever happens, whatever I face, there is someone who will face it with me.

It is not silence. It is an amputation.

I reach for him—habit, instinct, desperation—and there is nothing there. A hollow where his voice should be. An absence that weighs more than presence ever did. I reach and I reach and I reach, and I find only emptiness, only cold, only the terrible understanding that I am utterly, completely alone.

The cold presses in and the darkness rises and I am alone, I am completely alone, I am—

I scream.

Not the controlled sound of a sovereign issuing commands. Not the measured voice of an emperor who has spent his life learning to show nothing, to feel nothing that could be used against him, to be the throne rather than the man who sits upon it. This is something else. This is raw. This is ragged. This is the sound of a man who has just lost a part of himself he did not know he could lose.

The shadows seem to pause.

As if surprised.

Then they close in, and I have nothing left to fight them with, and the darkness swallows me whole.

The voice comes from everywhere.

And nowhere.

“You love her.”

I cannot move. The shadows hold me like a shroud—gentle, almost, the way a parent might wrap a sleeping child—but absolute. I can feel my heart beating. I can feel the hollow where Tianlong used to be, that awful empty space in my consciousness. I cannot feel my hands. I cannot feel my feet. I cannot feel anything except the cold and the dark and the voice that seems to come from the very air itself.

“I can taste it.”

The voice is soft. Almost tender. There is something beneath it that I recognize—grief, I think, old and vast and terrible—but the surface is calm. Patient. The voice of someone who has waited a very long time and has learned to find peace in waiting.

“I have been waiting for you to love her. I have been cultivating it.”