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I was shattered.

I was broken.

I was bleeding in the dragon wilds without a weapon, without a squad, and without a shield. But as I looked down at my pale, trembling hands, I realized the absolute, terrifying truth of the trial: I hadn’t just survived the crossing. I hadn’t just endured the dark. I had been judged by the ruler of the sky—and the darkness of the North had chosen to let me live.

THIRTY-FOUR

Pain was no longer a sensation; it was a physical location I was trapped inside.

If you stay in this mud, you die in this mud, my inner voice growled.

Caspian isn’t coming to carry you. Mal left you for dead. Get up.

I closed my eyes, dragging my mind away from the screaming nerve endings in my torso, down into the absolute center of my chest.

I pressed my right hand against my left ribs, my gloved fingers digging hard into my own flesh. I pulled on that tiny golden spark in my chest, forcing the latent Fae warmth out of my core and driving it straight into my now semi-broken bones.

“Haaah—!”

A strangled scream tore from my throat, instantly cut off as I bit down hard on my lower lip until blood burst across my tongue.

The lesser magic hit my shattered torso like a splash of molten iron. It didn’t gently soothe the tissue; it violently forced my body to repair what the dragon hadn’t. Beneath my palm, I felt the sickening, wet pop of my fractured ribs shifting. Muscles twitched and blood vessels sealed.

When the flare of magic finally burned out, I collapsed back into the mud, trembling, cold sweat pouring from every pore.

The bones were bound, but it was still a rough, incomplete fix. The ribs were fused, but the flesh around them was raw and severely bruised. Breathing no longer drowned me in blood, but every step was still going to cost me a piece of my sanity.

Could the beast really not have spared a little extra juice?

I forced myself up onto my hands and knees, my muscles shaking violently as I dragged my legs beneath me. I reached out, my fingers wrapping around the hilt of my dagger, using the blade as a stake in the mud to leverage my weight upward until I was standing on my own two feet.

The world spun in violent circles. I stood frozen in the gully for a full minute, waiting for the nausea to recede, my jaw locked into a wall of pure defiance.

I adjusted my weapons harness, wiped the dried blood from my chin, and turned my face toward the smoking peaks of the interior caldera.

I was completely alone. But I was still breathing.

The ascent toward the interior caldera was a solitary trek through a dying world.

Without Mal to watch my flank or Caspian to anchor my space, the vastness of Isath Nalore pressed down on my shoulders with a suffocating weight. I navigated the jagged basalt shelves alone, my boots crunching over frost-covered volcanic ash, my daggers drawn, my senses dialed to a pitch-black edge.

The landscape grew steadily more terrifying as I climbed higher into the mountain’s volcanic crown. The petrified black forest thinned out, replaced by massive, soaring spires of obsidian rock that looked like jagged black fingers reaching up to tear at the bruised clouds. Deep fissures carved into the stone belched constant plumes of sulfurous steam and boiling liquid mud, turning the air thick, hot, and suffocatingly dry.

Two hours after leaving the gully, the first subtle shift occurred.

It wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t the heavy impact of a talon on stone.

It was a violent drop in ambient pressure; a focused vacuum that sucked the heat right out of the air surrounding my body. The sulfurous steam venting from a nearby fissure instantly froze, turning into a plume of white frost before collapsing back into the dirt.

I froze, my hand locking around the pommel of my blade, my eyes darting across the basalt crags.

Nothing moved. The wind howled through the obsidian spires, carrying only the distant, hollow moan of the northern sea.

I took a slow breath, forcing my heart rate to settle, and continued walking.

Ten minutes later, I felt it again.

It was the unmistakable, terrifying sensation of being watched. A heavy and deeply predatory gaze was pressed against the small of my back, so intense it made the hairs on my arms stand straight up. It wasn’t the blind hunger of a scavenger tracking prey. It was an intelligent, evaluating pressure. A apex mind dissecting my gait, my posture, and my weakness.