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But the place where it had sat still pulsed faintly, a dull and sickly red, like the last ember of a fire starved of oxygen.

The air was thick and cold. The type that seemed to penetrate right through to the bone. I licked my dry lips, and I swore the air tasted of old pennies, like blood and rust and rot combined. But that wasn’t the weirdest part, as the silence seemed to have a kind of texture to it, like a held breath that was weighted. It was as though the whole of the dark were leaning over me and waiting to see what I would do.

“Atlas.” It came out cracked, as if my voice was broken. I pushed myself up, and my hands shook. I hated how small my own voice sounded down here, so I cleared my throat and tried again, louder this time,

“Atlas!”

It echoed through the space, but no one answered, met only with deafening silence. Some part of me already knew why. Which was why I needed to move, as I wasn’t built to just lie still and let the dark decide my fate. I never had been. So, I did the only thing I knew how to do.

I ran.

I found the stairs, and I took them two at a time, up out of the deep, calling his name as my heart slammed against my ribs. If I could just reach the upper halls, the bright halls, our bedchamber… if I could just find him… find Aster… find one, single living face… then all of this would resolve itself into something I could survive.

That was the plan.

Find Atlas.

Everything else came after.

But the problem with this plan was that the castle waiting at the top of those stairs wasn’t the one I knew.

No… It was a ruin.

It was the corpse of the place I had so nearly come to think of as home. The grand halls stood gutted to rubble, its stone charred black. The tapestries hanging in tattered rags, the great windows blown out into jagged teeth of glass, and through them poured a light the color of a dying bruise.

Ash drifted on a wind I couldn’t feel. The stone itself was scorched and split, as though some unstoppable fire had walked these corridors at its leisure, taking its time to cause the damage.

Something whispered then, a voice that was almost my own. ‘This is what would have happened if you had been a little slower. A little weaker. If you had not been there at all. This is the world you so nearly made.’

“No!” I said out loud, to no one. “No. This isn’t real!” I shouted louder even though the sight mocked me.

But my feet kept carrying me forward, because grief had hollowed me out and left only momentum behind, and I went on calling his name into the dark. And that’s when I realized…

I wasn’t alone in it.

I saw the first of them at the end of a long, ruined gallery. A shape, hunched and shuffling, turning in slow and aimless circles as though it had forgotten what it was looking for. It wasn’t a man. It had too many joints, and its edges smoked. When it lifted what passed for its head, I saw there was nothing in its face but a dull and desperate confusion. I froze in fright, but it didn’t come at me. It only looked, lost and pleading, and then went back to its hopeless circling.

Somewhere deeper in the ruins, I saw the others. A low, broken chorus, moaning, scratching, wandering aimlessly like ghosts. Every one of them was trying and failing to find a way out of a place I could already tell had none.

And I understood, the way someone understands things in a nightmare, all at once and without being told. Understood who they were.

These were the taken.

Where the lost ones went.

The ones the darkness had worn, used and emptied of their souls. The soldiers and Myths, all the creatures I half recognized from hundreds of terrible nights spent hiding from them. Every one of them was once a creature, with a body that even now was being made to do unspeakable things in a whole world away.

This was where the part of them that was left had gone. All of them, together. A world’s worth of the lost, gathered into one endless place, left forgotten in the dark.

I couldn’t look at them any longer. And the truth was, I didn’t have to because there was still a part of me, the stubborn, hopeless, stupid part, that flatly refused to believe this wasn’t just all in my head.

That this was just some horrid nightmare.

That was all it was.

Just a bad dream wearing the bones of the worst things I had ever seen, and there was only one way out of it, and that was to simply wake up. I only had to reach him.

I only had to reach Atlas.