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Ancestors, it hurts.
I don’t care where I go now, just make this wrenching, tearing—
Stop.
I landed flat on my back.
I could hear the drip of water in the distance, but I wasn’t wet.
Drip, drip, drip.
It wasn’t water.
But neither was it blood.
I recognized that stench—the same dark death I’d encountered before. First the human in the ravine, near the mountain rift. Then again, when I’d interrogated the human supplicant. The witch in the tower.
I tried to hold my breath, but that only made it worse—because then I felt the cold.
I’d been cold before. Moments before, even, when laying in that mountain lake. But this wascold. It was different than anything I’d ever felt. It seeped through my skin, into the body that had just coalesced into existence moments before. I could feel the shards of ice forming in my veins, being carried through my body towards the arteries and organs.
But it wasn’t just physical. The cold reached inside of my soul, towards the very essence of what made me. It snaked its tendrils around the core of my magic.
No, that couldn’t be.
I didn’t have any magic.
But I had no other word for it, that glowing ember inside of me that was suddenly reducing, shrinking. I was shrinking. Not my physical body, but my essence. I was disappearing, being sucked away into that creeping darkness.
No.
I wouldn’t let it win.
Not now. Not after everything I’d endured. Torture, loss, death… I was not dead, I’d realized by then. Nor was I going to die. I would not allow it.
I would not meet my end in this dark, cold place without a single soul to mark my passing. I’d fought too damn hard to let it all be for nothing, to dissolve into darkness and disappear.
I had to get out.
But how had I even gotten in? How had I ended up here?
Minutes ago I’d been in Baylaur—
Minutes or hours?
I had no idea. The world had been spinning around me, ripping me apart, and fusing me back together. It could have taken seconds or centuries. I had no conception. I just knew I couldn’t stay, or I would die.
Worse than die—I would be ripped apart until no shred of my self remained.
Wherever I was, it wasn’t of my world. This wasn’t Annwyn. This was another realm—one of the other layers the witch had spoken of.
Out. Out. Out. Ancestors, I was so cold.
It was just like in the Tower of Myda, when the cold slipped around me and pulled me down. I’d thought I was dying then, too. Except I woke up to find that Arran had carried me out, carried me to safety, sat at my bedside.
Arran.
His name reverberated through me with a force I’d never felt. That ember of light inside of me exploded, the tendrils of darkness flinching back. The ice in my veins began to warm.
