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Don’t die,a voice at the edge of my consciousness tells me.You’re not done. You haven’t saved him. Save him, Ayna. Save him to save yourself.
Perhaps I’m delirious from the blood spilling rapidly through the fingers I’m pressing over my wound. Perhaps the voice is really there. Perhaps it’s the lake urging me to fulfill a task neither of the brides whose tears it contains were able to, and it wants to see me succeed. It doesn’t matter when all I can focus on is Myron, who has stepped in between Ephegos and me, his magic making the ground shudder as he hauls it at the male with one furious blow after the other. In his hand, he’s holding a sword. In my blurry vision, it looks like it’s bursting into flames the way the Fire Fairies’ blades did. But then I notice the wall of flames storming for him—forus.My heart stutters—from my injury or from fear, I no longer care. All I can see is Myron and the fire rushing for him like bloodhounds on a trail.
No!
I struggle to move so I can protect him from the fiery inferno with my dying body. It’s all I can think of as I throw my arms wide, and all the water in the perimeter surges to my aid—the droplets suspended midair, the puddles on the floor, the melting ice on walls and corpses. All of it swirls and rages around us in a blur as I scream. I’m not fast enough to cover Myron with my body, but I’m fast enough to enclose us in a wall of crimson-stained liquid right as the fire is about to send us behind Eroth’s Veil.
It hurts—Guardians, does it hurt. Ignoring the agony spreading along my skin as steam crawls through my clothes, nipping at my skin, I maintain the barrier of water, pouring my everything into it. Myron is there, in front of me, like a shield, but his power is near-depleted, his sword clatters to the ground as it heats like in a forge, tendrils of smoke and haze swishing along his talons as he lifts his arm, ready to block whatever is coming our way with his bare hands.
Yet the fog of water and fire consuming each other obscures everything but the tiny space I’m protecting, and when a slender blade of silver and fire slashes through the wall around us, I don’t see it coming. Neither does he.
And all I can do is cry out as the sharp tip buries itself in Myron’s bare chest.
Myron’s talons rake across my arm as he collapses at my feet, trying to hold on, and I’m too weak to catch him. Blood pulses from the wound in my side, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel the pain or the strength draining from me with each thud of my heart because there’s only one thing I can focus on, and that’s the river of crimson gushing from Myron’s chest, right where his heart is buried beneath skin, muscle, and bone.
“Myron.” Dropping to my knees beside him, I clutch his hand with my free one while the other keeps up the wall of water, willing it to reform where it dissipates from the heat the Flames are pitting against it. How I still have any strength left to maintain this shield, I can’t even begin to understand. All I know is that, if I don’t, we’re both dead.
We can’t rely on Royad and Clio and whatever few Crows are still standing to defeat the Fire Fairies and save us. If my magic slips, we’ll be exposed, and Ephegos can finish what he started. I can hear his cruel laugh somewhere on the other side of the wall that won’t allow them to break through and finish us, but it’s only a matter of time now.
“Get up.” I tug on Myron’s wing as I plead with him to fight the pain and drowsiness coming with severe blood loss.
All he does is give me a weak smile. It’s then that I know he won’t be getting up. He won’t be doing anything at all. Blood wells on his lips as he opens them to speak, and a cough escapes instead.
“Save your strength.” I brush back his hair from his forehead, sliding my hand over the wound in delusional hope that my magic might become of the healing sort the way the lake responded when I most needed it. But nothing happens. No miraculous light sealing the gash in his flesh, no tingling in my palm that would tell me that I have the power to save him. “It will be all right.” It’s a lie, and we both know it, although the smile he gives me tells me he wants to believe it as desperately as I do.
“I dream of flying with you, Ayna.” His voice is hoarse and unsteady from pain, but he fights for each word as if his life depends on it.
“Don’t speak. Use the energy to heal yourself.” It’s more a plea than a command even when I’m desperately trying to order him to draw upon the magic that used to save him from all cuts and bruises.
He shakes his head an inch, just once, but it’s confirmation he doesn’t have any reserves left to save himself or me. We’re dying. Both of us.
If Eroth is merciful, he’ll take me first so I won’t need to watch Myron take his final breath, so I won’t need to see him suffer.
The wound in my side is preventing me from doing anything but crouch at his side, bent low enough to watch his face contort in pain with each labored breath he’s taking.
“I dream of flying with you, Ayna,” he begins again, and this time, I’m not stopping him. “I dream of holding you in my arms as we soar across the ocean. I dream of finding a new life for the both of us.” His breath hitches as his body spasms. Fresh blood trickles from the corner of his mouth, but this time, it has nothing to do with him speaking words he shouldn’t. It’s not the curse making him bleed. “I dream of never letting you go. But you’re not mine. Even if I love you with all that I am. I’ll die with the curse unbroken, and Royad will shoulder the burden…” His voice trails away as I place a finger on his lips, stopping him before he can break my heart with words of love and death. With a future we can never have.
“I tried,” I tell him instead. “I tried to break it. I’d do it with my dying breath if I knew how.” As if in response, it becomes hard to breathe at all. My lungs won’t take in enough air to form a sentence.
“It’s all right?—”
There is no battle noise in our small bubble of heat and steam and death; it’s him and me and all the words spoken and unspoken that I want to cling to. I want that future. I want it so badly that my chest aches more than the wound that’s slowly killing me.
“You’ll live, Wolayna. Promise me you’ll live.” His voice is fading. It’s so weak I need to lean in to catch those precious words.
“You’ll live, too.” I try to phrase it like a promise, but I have nothing left of the hope once dwelling in the chambers of my heart.
Because Myron’s gaze locks on mine, those all-black eyes glazed with tears as he slides his palm to my ribs just above the cut that’s bleeding and aching—but not as badly as my heart. “Live, my Ayna,” he whispers three little words I barely catch, and before I understand what he’s doing, a streak of warmth flows from his palm into my injured flesh, bringing instant relief to the pulsing pain.
“Stop.” I try to slide out from under his touch, but I’m too weak to move more than a few inches. His hand drops from my waist to the blood-soaked floor, and the thud slaps me with a finality almost as if he’d hit me in the face.
“No!” My wail bounces through the room like a piercing spear of rusty metal. “You can’t do this.” I shake his shoulder, but Myron’s lashes flutter, gaze going unfocused as his head lolls to the side. “You can’t leave me behind.”Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.
Tears burn in my eyes, dripping down my cheeks onto Myron’s stilling features. His chest rises slowly, as if in a last effort to beat death.
“Please,” I whisper. “Please don’t die. Please don’t leave me.” Because I have nothing and no one in this world if he dies. Because for everything he’s done to save me, he doesn’t deserve to die like that.
The steam around us has cooled, replaced by a wall of salty water as the lake encloses us like a shield of its own, taking the place of my magic when I’m failing.
