Page 225 of Keldori By Daybreak

I gasped for air at the sudden lightness. Magick passed through me, still electric and paralyzing, but no longer suffocating. The hunger was gone, and I looked up at Ferrin from where I lay on the ice.

The prison he’d formed around us was gone, and he grinned, but not at me. He focused on something behind me instead, something beyond the smoldering embers of his barrier.

A horrible, guttural grunt formed around my name.

“Wren,” Ciarán choked.

I rolled on the ice, unable to move against the Skal using my body as a conduit.

Ciarán was on his hands and knees, shaking as he siphoned the Skal down our tether. Orange sparks melted the snow around him, but no matter how much of the magick he expelled, Ferrin didn’t stop.

“Ciarán!” I fought against unresponsive muscles.

“My Lady,” he managed through our tether. “Let me take your Skal for you. You were… everything.”

And then bones splintered, and Ciarán tore open.

45. Advanced Entropic Reactions

Chaos erupted. The ice shook and cracked beneath me. Iseult barked orders to protect the Rift. Mom screamed my name from where she bent over Gams’s too-still body.

And what remained of Ciarán stood at the center of it all. Shadow stretched over a swollen skull, and orange Skal-light glowed from the recesses of deepset eyes. He reared on monstrous hind legs and shrieked. The piercing wail reverberated across the ice.

It was the same sound that had struck me numb with fear so many times, that made every nerve stand on high alert, but now, it didn’t sound real.

There could not be a rotsbane twitching in front of me, because that was where Ciarán had been standing. The shredded remnants of his clothes lay at the rotsbane’s clawed feet. The metal scythe he’d made during our travels and then had kept on his belt glinted in the moonlight from within the folds of his discarded cloak.

But Ciarán could not be a rotsbane.

Brave, gentle Ciarán who was going to spend the rest of his life in Keldori, studying architecture and annoying me in all the best ways, was not a rotsbane.

I refused to believe it.

However, my breaths were too shallow and my heart too quick, as if my body had accepted reality more easily than my mind.

But my mind could not, would not accept that Ciarán was gone because he was still there, screaming in my head in time with the rotsbane’s awful cry.

Ciarán was screaming.

The horror of it all finally clicked, and I screamed too.

Ciarán charged, and I had no energy, no mettle left to move. My grandma had been shot. Ciarán was a rotsbane. Ferrin was about to go through the Rift.

We’d lost, and as Ciarán’s four claws reached for me, I thought how at least I would get to feel his embrace one last time.

“Get up, dammit!” Purple fire danced to my left, and Ciarán changed trajectory to chase after it. Orla’s arms hooked under mine and hoisted me to my feet. “You did not bring us all this way just to give up, Wren! You are better than that!”

Ice shuddered and rose from the frozen sea to create a craggy barrier between Ciarán and the Rift. Orla and I staggered out of the way of rising shards. The bay groaned, Ciarán’s rotsbane shrieked, and ice crashed, but louder than anything was Ciarán screaming in my head.

Not only was he still conscious inside the monster, but he was in pain.

Ahead Iseult helped Fana climb up the icy cliffs that had risen to protect the Rift. Mom was already at the top, her hands glowing blue as she conducted the ice to form the bluffs. Gams lay at her feet, but I couldn’t tell at this distance or from this angle if she was okay.

“Ciarán—” I gasped against Orla.

“We don’t stop fighting, Wren. We keep going.” She knelt at the base of the first icy wall to give me a step up. There wasn’t time to argue over who should help whom, so I accepted the boost, found my footing, and then reached down to help her after me.

Ice cut into my hands and chilled me through my cloak and Keel Watch Harbor crewneck, but Orla was right. We keep going, even with Ciarán’s unrelenting cries filling my head.