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My hand finds Az’s throat, speckles of white peppering my vision.
He fights against my touch, but I don’t care as I envelop him in fear, every bit of anguish I held back from Blaise bursting into the man who touched…who touched…
“Kiran, stop.”
I barely register Fin’s voice, his hand on my shoulder as my sense returns to me.
“It’s not them. Kiran, it’s not them.”
I blink, and the faces of the two people in the bed come into focus.
The man writhing in my grasp. Not Az, but a male of similar build. Unfamiliar.
The woman beside him jolts upward, pulling the blanket to cover her chest.
She looks at me.
And before I can stop her.
She screams.
CHAPTER 100
ZORA
There’s a moment before the stalactite spears Farin when I glimpse speckles of our life together.
Except, it’s not this life—abandoned on this strange island for eternity, making the best of such an existence.
It’s a dozen lives, blended together, overlapping, blurring the lines between this world and others.
But then there’s the snap of Farin’s bones, and the lives never meant for us fade away.
I have to battle the dizziness from where my head hit the cave wall, but I stagger over to Farin’s body.
For a moment, I think he’s dead, but then I catch sight of his chest, heaving barely. The stalactite juts from his shoulder, having narrowly missed his heart.
“Farin,” I say, my voice frantic, but he doesn’t respond. His mouth hangs slightly ajar. When he coughs, blood spews from his lips.
“No.” My mind races, and I shuffle through lifetimes of memories, knowledge, searching for what I’m supposed to do. I fear removing the stalactite will only bolster the bleeding, but the cave is still trembling, and keeping him here only risks another stalactite falling on him.
I don’t have time to think. I yank the stalactite from his shoulder, quickly wrapping my makeshift sail-blanket around my hand and using it to grab a stone from the border of smoldering fire. When I press it to his skin, he lets out a groan.
“Doesn’t feel good, does it?” I say. The words come out biting, though I’m praying to the Fates he’ll stay with me.
“You should be a healer with that bedside manner of yours, Wanderer,” Farin mutters, and I let out a relieved gasp. At least he’s conscious.
I drag him by his armpits out of the cave.
In the distance, smoke smolders at the top of the mountain in the center of the island.
“What,” Farin says, his voice slurred, “is that?”
For a moment, I think perhaps Farin isn’t as cognizant as I thought, but then it hits me. Farin describes the world from which he comes as having a flat landscape. Now that I consider it, I can’t even remember enough about Alondria to know if he would have encountered any while living in Nox’s head.
“That’s a volcano,” I explain, to which Farin frowns.
“A smoking mountain?”
