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I froze at that sight. I’d thought the tendrils and smoke around the altar were sickening, but this specter felt malignant. And then Voski tightened his arm around my waist and swept me into it.

I gasped, grabbed for him as he lifted me, but there was no time for words.

In the blink of an eye, the stairs disappeared. The castle. All those watching eyes, gone.

And the dragons as well.

The space in my chest that was shaped like Koa, that fed me love, and comfort, and companionship was gone as if it had never existed. And in its place… nothing. A hollow, whistling dark. Absence.

The scream that tore from my throat did not stop. It rang in my ears and hummed in my bones. I clawed and reached and stretched until I lost all air.

Still nothing.

No time. No space. No grip. I would reach for my dragon, but there was no path. No link. No means. It was as if she’d never existed, and my sense of her was only a beautiful dream.

My bones rattled under my skin, and the pressure in my chest grew with every passing second. The hollow left by her lack was voracious with need. But in her absence it wanted to collapse. An empty eggshell, grieving the life that should have grown within, crushed in the grip of God Himself.

Every piece of me that remained wept for her.

And every beat of my heart threatened to be the last.

There was nothing. No one. I’d been cast off, pitched into a frigid void. Unable to control anything as I hurtled through suffocating darkness.

This was death.

The chilling certainty arrived a hairsbreadth before I was thrown into a wall and shattered.

Splintered bone, dissonant shriek.

GRACE. NO!

I slammed into an angular chest, skin smarting as if blistered, from head to toe. My ears rang. I blinked, but my sight was hazy.

Black. Black. Midnight blue.

‘Grace… Grace!’ The voice made me shake.

I coughed and something shifted. My heart swelled, my lungs filled, and Koa returned. The chamber where she’d been, the one crushed to nothing, inflated in a blink and my ribs creaked as pain sang down my spine.

I blinked and sight returned. Smell. Sensation.

The world and time sucked back into place.

Voski, eyes so round behind the black strands of his hair that fell between us like the bars of a prison, his expression horrified, and clouded with pain. “Grace, can you hear me?!”

I nodded, coughed again.

The blistering on my cheeks was his palms, cupping my face. The current pushing the air away was his breath.

“Are you here?”

Such an odd question, but I understood it. I nodded again. Choked once more. Realized I was bent in half when his face paled to gray and he straightened, stumbling away from me, clawing at the furniture, tripping, falling to all fours, then vomiting, heaving.

My sight blurred again, but this time with tears. I hurt. And there was something cold, something terrifying that clung to my skin.

‘Koa?!’ I screamed into the link, clawing for that piece of my heart that was her, weeping with relief when she answered me.

‘Yes, Grace! Yes! Firebird!’ She dissolved into wordless cries and flickering images of herself searching, pleading, screaming for me.